for four or five years in small wickerwork cages, where they’re kept in the dark, and not even allowed to set foot on the ground on any pretext.  They’re shut up in these prisons when they’re about fourteen, and there they’re kept, strictly tabooed, till they’re just going to be married.  I went to see them myself; it was a horrid sight.  The poor creatures were confined in a dark, close hut, without air or ventilation, in that stifling climate, which is as unendurable from heat as this one is from cold and damp and fogginess; and there they sat in cages, coarsely woven from broad leaves of the pandanus trees, so that no light could enter; for the people believed that light would kill them.  No man might see them, because it was close taboo; but at last, with great difficulty, I persuaded the chief and the old lady who guarded them to let them come out for a minute to look at me.  A lot of beads and cloth overcame these people’s scruples; and with great reluctance they opened the cages.  But only the old woman looked; the chief was afraid, and turned his head the other way, mumbling charms to his fetich.  Out they stole, one by one, poor souls, ashamed and frightened, hiding their faces in their hands, thinking I was going to hurt them or eat them—­just as your nieces would do if I proposed to-day to take them to Exeter—­and a dreadful sight they were, cramped with long sitting in one close position, and their eyes all blinded by the glare of the sunlight after the long darkness.  I’ve seen women shut up in pretty much the same way in other countries, but I never saw quite so bad a case as this of New Ireland.”

“Well, you can’t say we’ve anything answering to that in England,” Frida put in, looking across at him with her frank, open countenance.

“No, not quite like that, in detail, perhaps, but pretty much the same in general principle,” Bertram answered warmly.  “Your girls here are not cooped up in actual cages, but they’re confined in barrack-schools, as like prisons as possible; and they’re repressed at every turn in every natural instinct of play or society.  They mustn’t go here or they mustn’t go there; they mustn’t talk to this one or to that one; they mustn’t do this, or that, or the other; their whole life is bound round, I’m told, by a closely woven web of restrictions and restraints, which have no other object or end in view than the interests of a purely hypothetical husband.  The Chinese cramp their women’s feet to make them small and useless:  you cramp your women’s brains for the self-same purpose.  Even light’s excluded; for they mustn’t read books that would make them think; they mustn’t be allowed to suspect the bare possibility that the world may be otherwise than as their priests and nurses and grandmothers tell them, though most even of your own men know it well to be something quite different.  Why, I met a girl at that dance I went to in London the other evening, who told me she wasn’t allowed to read a book called Tess