society that victimizes girls as a kind of weakness, in the sense that she is collaborating with the forces that made her rape possible. Another possible interpretation has to do with the narrator's instinctive desire to be "fair" to Badawi. He did, after all, keep his word and ask for her hand. Her hesitation in turning him down is a kind of moral weakness.

In "The Answer is No," an older teacher feels some apprehension at the new headmaster of the school. She experiences a degree of dread at the idea of shaking his hand or looking him in the eyes. The reader soon learns that when the narrator was a teenager the headmaster gained her trust as a tutor only to rape her when her father was away.

He promises to ask her hand in marriage when she comes of age, and he does. It is at this moment that the narrator "hates her own weakness" as she "hates his strength." She hates his audacity and forwardness and his seeming ignorance that he ever did anything wrong. She hates his cunning in that he had sprung this trap for her, leaving her to "accept or to close the door forever."

In truth, what she hates is not "strength" in the traditional sense of the word, it is a deviously-gained upper hand that he attains through manipulation and his own societal privilege. In the same way, hers is not truly weakness, but misfortune.

The narrator blames herself for being weak in having sex withBadawi when she was a girl, even though she realizes he was in a position of power over her.

The story describes a teacher, an older women, who feels some distress when she learns who her new headmaster is.  As the tale progresses, we learn that her distress comes from the fact that she knows who he is.  When she was a teenager, her parents hired him to be her tutor.  He was twenty-five years older than her, and she was only fourteen, so she saw him as a father figure. 

The narrator continually states that she did not see him as a threat.  She is rationalizing, giving herself an out.  She is reminding herself that she was not to blame.  Of course, she is not to blame.  Even if she consented, she was a child.  He raped her, in a statutory sense at least.  Her guilt is the guilt that rape victims feel.

How, then, had it happened? In her innocence she had not noticed any change in his behavior to put her on her guard. … Without love or desire on her part the thing had happened.

He took advantage of her because he knew that she considered him a “second father” and felt no love for him, but did not really suspect anything.  He caught her off guard and used her inexperience and position against her.  Then he said he would come back and offer to marry her, and he did, but she refused him.  She did not consider him a person of good character, because a person of good character would not have taken advantage of a young girl less than half his age to begin with.

Interestingly enough, she does not get married.  She is so ashamed, that this one instance dictates her life.

Day by day she becomes older. She avoids love, fears it.

When he comes back into her life, it hits her like a brick. She does not know what to do.  She does not know how to let it affect her.  He is surprised to see her, and surprised that she has never married.  He has gone on with his life.  This incident has not let her go on with hers.  After it, she felt that the only thing she could do after continuing with school was to become a teacher and then an old maid.  She punished herself for the rest of her life, never letting herself fall in love, because she hated love.  Love was tainted for her, because of what he had done to her.  She hated herself, because she felt that her own weakness made her complicit.  Her self-loathing followed her the rest of her life.