Frida felt the conversation was beginning to travel beyond her ideas of propriety, so she checked its excursions by answering gravely:  “Oh, Mr. Ingledew, you don’t understand our code of morals.  But I’m sure you don’t find your East End young ladies so fearfully particular?”

“They certainly haven’t quite so many taboos,” Bertram answered quietly.  “But that’s always the way in tabooing societies.  These things are naturally worst among the chiefs and great people.  I remember when I was stopping among the Ot Danoms of Borneo, the daughters of chiefs and great sun-descended families were shut up at eight or ten years old, in a little cell or room, as a religious duty, and cut off from all intercourse with the outside world for many years together.  The cell’s dimly lit by a single small window, placed high in the wall, so that the unhappy girl never sees anybody or anything, but passes her life in almost total darkness.  She mayn’t leave the room on any pretext whatever, not even for the most pressing and necessary purposes.  None of her family may see her face; but a single slave woman’s appointed to accompany her and wait upon her.  Long want of exercise stunts her bodily growth, and when at last she becomes a woman, and emerges from her prison, her complexion has grown wan and pale and waxlike.  They take her out in solemn guise and show her the sun, the sky, the land, the water, the trees, the flowers, and tell her all their names, as if to a newborn creature.  Then a great feast is made, a poor crouching slave is killed with a blow of the sword, and the girl is solemnly smeared with his reeking blood, by way of initiation.  But this is only done, of course, with the daughters of wealthy and powerful families.  And I find it pretty much the same in England.  In all these matters, your poorer classes are relatively pure and simple and natural.  It’s your richer and worse and more selfish classes among whom sex-taboos are strongest and most unnatural.”

Frida looked up at him a little pleadingly.

“Do you know, Mr. Ingledew,” she said, in a trembling voice, “I’m sure you don’t mean it for intentional rudeness, but it sounds to us very like it, when you speak of our taboos and compare us openly to these dreadful savages.  I’m a woman, I know; but—­I don’t like to hear you speak so about my England.”

The words took Bertram fairly by surprise.  He was wholly unacquainted with that rank form of provincialism which we know as patriotism.  He leaned across towards her with a look of deep pain on his handsome face.

“Oh, Mrs. Monteith,” he cried earnestly, “if you don’t like it, I’ll never again speak of them as taboos in your presence.  I didn’t dream you could object.  It seems so natural to us—­well—­to describe like customs by like names in every case.  But if it gives you pain—­why, sooner than do that, I’d never again say a single word while I live about an English custom!”