“Well, if it would be any convenience to you,” Bertram put in with a serious face, “I’m rather busy on Wednesday; but I could manage to take up a portmanteau to town with my dress things in the morning, meet the girls at Paddington, and run down by the evening express in time to go with them to the hotel you meant to stop at.  They’re those two pretty blondes I met here at tea last Sunday, aren’t they?”

Frida looked at him, half-incredulous.  He was very nice, she knew, and very quaint and fresh and unsophisticated and unconventional; but could he be really quite so ignorant of the common usages of civilised society as to suppose it possible he could run down alone with two young girls to stop by themselves, without even a chaperon, at an hotel at Exeter?  She gazed at him curiously.  “Oh, Mr. Ingledew,” she said, “now you’re really too ridiculous!”

Bertram coloured up like a boy.  If she had been in any doubt before as to his sincerity and simplicity, she could be so no longer.  “Oh, I forgot about the taboo,” he said.  “I’m so sorry I hurt you.  I was only thinking what a pity those two nice girls should be cheated out of their expected pleasure by a silly question of pretended mourning, where even you yourself, who have got to wear it, don’t assume that you feel the slightest tinge of sorrow.  I remember now, of course, what a lady told me in London the other day:  your young girls aren’t even allowed to go out travelling alone without their mother or brothers, in order to taboo them absolutely beforehand for the possible husband who may some day marry them.  It was a pitiful tale.  I thought it all most painful and shocking.”

“But you don’t mean to say,” Frida cried, equally shocked and astonished in her turn, “that you’d let young girls go out alone anywhere with unmarried men?  Goodness gracious, how dreadful!”

“Why not?” Bertram asked, with transparent simplicity.

“Why, just consider the consequences!” Frida exclaimed, with a blush, after a moment’s hesitation.

“There couldn’t be any consequences, unless they both liked and respected one another,” Bertram answered in the most matter-of-course voice in the world; “and if they do that, we think at home it’s nobody’s business to interfere in any way with the free expression of their individuality, in this the most sacred and personal matter of human intercourse.  It’s the one point of private conduct about which we’re all at home most sensitively anxious not to meddle, to interfere, or even to criticise.  We think such affairs should be left entirely to the hearts and consciences of the two persons concerned, who must surely know best how they feel towards one another.  But I remember having met lots of taboos among other barbarians, in much the same way, to preserve the mere material purity of their women—­a thing we at home wouldn’t dream of even questioning.  In New Ireland, for instance, I saw poor girls confined