take as little notice of them as possible in any way
whenever I find myself in unsympathetic society."

"Then you don't think ME unsympathetic?" Frida murmured, with a glow of
pleasure.

"O Frida," the young man cried, bending forward and looking at her, "you
know very well you're the only person here I care for in the least or
have the slightest sympathy with."

Frida was pleased he should say so; he was so nice and gentle: but she
felt constrained none the less to protest, for form's sake at least,
against his calling her once more so familiarly by her Christian name.
"NOT Frida to you, if you please, Mr. Ingledew," she said as stiffly as
she could manage. "You know it isn't right. Mrs. Monteith, you must call
me." But she wasn't as angry, somehow, at the liberty he had taken as
she would have been in anybody else's case; he was so very peculiar.

Bertram Ingledew paused and checked himself.

"You think I do it on purpose," he said with an apologetic air; "I
know you do, of course; but I assure you I don't. It's all pure
forgetfulness. The fact is, nobody can possibly call to mind all the
intricacies of your English and European customs at once, unless he's
to the manner born, and carefully brought up to them from his earliest
childhood, as all of you yourselves have been. He may recollect them
after an effort when he thinks of them seriously; but he can't possibly
bear them all in mind at once every hour of the day and night by a pure
tour de force of mental concentration. You know it's the same with
your people in other barbarous countries. Your own travellers say
it themselves about the customs of Islam. They can't learn them and
remember them all at every moment of their lives, as the Mohammedans do;
and to make one slip there is instant death to them."

Frida looked at him earnestly. "But I hope," she said with an air of
deprecation, pulling a rose to pieces, petal by petal, nervously, as she
spoke, "you don't put us on quite the same level as Mohammedans. We're
so much more civilised. So much better in every way. Do you know, Mr.
Ingledew," and she hesitated for a minute, "I can't bear to differ from
you or blame you in anything, because you always appear to me so wise
and good and kind-hearted and reasonable; but it often surprises me,
and even hurts me, when you seem to talk of us all as if we were just
so many savages. You're always speaking about taboo, and castes, and
poojah, and fetiches, as if we w