‘But if his woman ord——­told him to do it?’ I suggested.

’Then she’d despise him the more for doing it. You needn’t laugh.  ‘You’re coming to the same sort of thing in England.’

I returned to the little gathering.  A woman was talking to them as one accustomed to talk from birth.  They listened with the rigid attention of men early trained to listen to, but not to talk with, women.  She was, to put it mildly, the mother of all she-bores, but when she moved on, no man ventured to say as much.

‘That’s what I mean by being school-manned to death,’ said my acquaintance wickedly.  ’Why, she bored ’em stiff; but they are so well brought up, they didn’t even know they were bored.  Some day the American Man is going to revolt.’

‘And what’ll the American Woman do?’

‘She’ll sit and cry—­and it’ll do her good.’

Later on, I met a woman from a certain Western State seeing God’s great, happy, inattentive world for the first time, and rather distressed that it was not like hers.  She had always understood that the English were brutal to their wives—­the papers of her State said so. (If you only knew the papers of her State I) But she had not noticed any scandalous treatment so far, and Englishwomen, whom she admitted she would never understand, seemed to enjoy a certain specious liberty and equality; while Englishmen were distinctly kind to girls in difficulties over their baggage and tickets on strange railways.  Quite a nice people, she concluded, but without much sense of humour.  One day, she showed me what looked like a fashion-paper print of a dress-stuff—­a pretty oval medallion of stars on a striped grenadine background that somehow seemed familiar.

‘How nice!  What is it?’ I asked.

‘Our National Flag,’ she replied.

‘Indeed.  But it doesn’t look quite——­’

’No.  This is a new design for arranging the stars so that they shall be easier to count and more decorative in effect.  We’re going to take a vote on it in our State, where we have the franchise.  I shall cast my vote when I get home.’

‘Really!  And how will you vote?’

‘I’m just thinking that out.’  She spread the picture on her knee and considered it, head to one side, as though it were indeed dress material.

All this while the land of Egypt marched solemnly beside us on either hand.  The river being low, we saw it from the boat as one long plinth, twelve to twenty feet high of brownish, purplish mud, visibly upheld every hundred yards or so by glistening copper caryatides in the shape of naked men baling water up to the crops above.  Behind that bright emerald line ran the fawn-or tiger-coloured background of desert, and a pale blue sky closed all.  There was Egypt even as the Pharaohs, their engineers and architects, had seen it—­land to cultivate, folk and cattle for the work, and outside that work no distraction nor allurement of any kind whatever, save when the