religion
designed for the benefit of the few at the expense of the many, a creed
and code of gross selfishness--were not women only admitted to Heaven by
the intercession of their husbands and after unceasing prayer? Whether
beasts of burden, the girl with the goolah, women in the harem, or
servants of pleasure, they were all in the bonds of slavery, and the
land was in moral darkness. So it seemed to her.

How many times had she written these things in different forms and to
different people--so often, too often, to the British Consul at Cairo,
whose patience waned. At first, the seizure of conscripts, with all
that it involved, had excited her greatly. It had required all her
common-sense to prevent her, then and there, protesting, pleading,
with the kavass, who did the duty of Ismail's Sirdar. She had confined
herself, however, to asking for permission to give the men cigarettes
and slippers, dates and bread, and bags of lentils for soup. Even this
was not unaccompanied by danger, for the Mahommedan mind could not at
first tolerate the idea of a lady going unveiled; only fellah women,
domestic cattle, bared their faces to the world. The conscripts, too,
going to their death--for how few of them ever returned?--leaving behind
all hope, all freedom, passing to starvation and cruelty, at last to be
cut down by the Arab, or left dying of illness in the desert, they took
her gifts with sullen faces. Her beautiful freedom was in such contrast
to their torture, slavery of a direful kind. But as again and again the
kavasses came and opened midnight doors and snatched away the young men,
her influence had grown so fast that her presence brought comfort, and
she helped to assuage the grief of the wailing women. She even urged
upon them that philosophy of their own, which said "Malaish" to all
things--the "It is no matter," of the fated Hamlet. In time she began to
be grateful that an apathetic resignation, akin to the quiet of despair,
was the possession of their race. She was far from aware that something
in their life, of their philosophy, was affecting her understanding.
She had a strong brain and a stronger will, but she had a capacity
for feeling greater still, and this gave her imagination, temperament,
and--though it would have shocked her to know it--a certain credulity,
easily transmutable into superstition. Yet, as her sympathies were,
to some extent, rationalised by stern fact and everlasting custom, her
opposition