quantities, they have to be beaten with rods, or pricked with thorns, or stung with nettles, till they’ve filled to the last drop the regulation bottle.  In Swaziland, too, when the king dies, so the queen told me, every family of his subjects has to lose one of its sons or daughters, in order that they may all truly grieve at the loss of their sovereign.  I think there are more horrible and cruel devices in the way of death-taboos and death-customs than anything else I’ve met in my researches.  Indeed, most of our nomologists at home believe that all taboos originally arose out of ancestral ghost-worship, and sprang from the craven fear of dead kings or dead relatives.  They think fetiches and gods and other imaginary supernatural beings were all in the last resort developed out of ghosts, hostile or friendly; and from what I see abroad, I incline to agree with them.  But this mourning superstition, now—­ surely it must do a great deal of harm in poor households in England.  People who can very ill afford to throw away good dresses must have to give them up, and get new black ones, and that often at the very moment when they’re just deprived of the aid of their only support and bread-winner.  I wonder it doesn’t occur to them that this is absolutely wrong, and that they oughtn’t to prefer the meaningless fetich to their clear moral duty.”

“They’re afraid of what people would say of them,” Frida ventured to interpose.  “You see, we’re all so frightened of breaking through an established custom.”

“Yes, I notice that always, wherever I go in England,” Bertram answered.  “There’s apparently no clear idea of what’s right and wrong at all, in the ethical sense, as apart from what’s usual.  I was talking to a lady up in London to-day about a certain matter I may perhaps mention to you by-and-by when occasion serves, and she said she’d been ‘always brought up to think’ so-and-so.  It seemed to me a very queer substitute indeed for thinking.”

“I never thought of that,” Frida answered slowly.  “I’ve said the same thing a hundred times over myself before now; and I see how irrational it is.  But, there, Mr. Ingledew, that’s why I always like talking with you so much:  you make one take such a totally new view of things.”

She looked down and was silent a minute.  Her breast heaved and fell.  She was a beautiful woman, very tall and queenly.  Bertram looked at her and paused; then he went on hurriedly, just to break the awkward silence:  “And this dance at Exeter, then—­I suppose you won’t go to it?”

“Oh, I can’t, of course,” Frida answered quickly.  “And my two other nieces—­Robert’s side, you know—­who have nothing at all to do with my brother Tom’s wife, out there in India—­they’ll be so disappointed.  I was going to take them down to it.  Nasty thing!  How annoying of her!  She might have chosen some other time to go and die, I’m sure, than just when she knew I wanted to go to Exeter!”