ybody or anything, but passes her life
in almost total darkness. She mayn't leave the room on any pretext
whatever, not even for the most pressing and necessary purposes. None
of her family may see her face; but a single slave woman's appointed to
accompany her and wait upon her. Long want of exercise stunts her bodily
growth, and when at last she becomes a woman, and emerges from her
prison, her complexion has grown wan and pale and waxlike. They take her
out in solemn guise and show her the sun, the sky, the land, the water,
the trees, the flowers, and tell her all their names, as if to a newborn
creature. Then a great feast is made, a poor crouching slave is killed
with a blow of the sword, and the girl is solemnly smeared with his
reeking blood, by way of initiation. But this is only done, of course,
with the daughters of wealthy and powerful families. And I find it
pretty much the same in England. In all these matters, your poorer
classes are relatively pure and simple and natural. It's your richer and
worse and more selfish classes among whom sex-taboos are strongest and
most unnatural."

Frida looked up at him a little pleadingly.

"Do you know, Mr. Ingledew," she said, in a trembling voice, "I'm sure
you don't mean it for intentional rudeness, but it sounds to us very
like it, when you speak of our taboos and compare us openly to these
dreadful savages. I'm a woman, I know; but--I don't like to hear you
speak so about my England."

The words took Bertram fairly by surprise. He was wholly unacquainted
with that rank form of provincialism which we know as patriotism. He
leaned across towards her with a look of deep pain on his handsome face.

"Oh, Mrs. Monteith," he cried earnestly, "if YOU don't like it, I'll
never again speak of them as taboos in your presence. I didn't dream you
could object. It seems so natural to us--well--to describe like customs
by like names in every case. But if it gives you pain--why, sooner than
do that, I'd never again say a single word while I live about an English
custom!"

His face was very near hers, and he was a son of Adam, like all the
rest of us--not a being of another sphere, as Frida was sometimes half
tempted to consider him. What might next have happened he himself hardly
knew, for he was an impulsive creature, and Frida's rich lips were full
and crimson, had not Philip's arrival with the two Miss Hardys to make
up a set diverted for the moment the nascent possibility