But Bertram was not well out of his troubles yet.  Martha brought the round tray—­Oriental brass, finely chased with flowing Arabic inscriptions—­and laid it down on the dainty little rustic table.  Then she handed about the cups.  Bertram rose to help her.  “Mayn’t I do it for you?” he said, as politely as he would have said it to a lady in her drawing-room.

“No, thank you, sir,” Martha answered, turning red at the offer, but with the imperturbable solemnity of the well-trained English servant.  She “knew her place,” and resented the intrusion.  But Bertram had his own notions of politeness, too, which were not to be lightly set aside for local class distinctions.  He could not see a pretty girl handing cups to guests without instinctively rising from his seat to assist her.  So, very much to Martha’s embarrassment, he continued to give his help in passing the cake and the bread-and-butter.  As soon as she was gone, he turned round to Philip.  “That’s a very pretty girl and a very nice girl,” he said simply.  “I wonder, now, as you haven’t a wife, you’ve never thought of marrying her.”

The remark fell like a thunderbolt on the assembled group.  Even Frida was shocked.  Your most open-minded woman begins to draw a line when you touch her class prejudices in the matter of marriage, especially with reference to her own relations.  “Why, really, Mr. Ingledew,” she said, looking up at him reproachfully, “you can’t mean to say you think my brother could marry the parlour-maid!”

Bertram saw at a glance he had once more unwittingly run his head against one of the dearest of these strange people’s taboos; but he made no retort openly.  He only reflected in silence to himself how unnatural and how wrong they would all think it at home that a young man of Philip’s age should remain nominally celibate; how horrified they would be at the abject misery and degradation such conduct on the part of half his caste must inevitably imply for thousands of innocent young girls of lower station, whose lives he now knew were remorselessly sacrificed in vile dens of tainted London to the supposed social necessity that young men of a certain class should marry late in a certain style, and “keep a wife in the way she’s been accustomed to.”  He remembered with a checked sigh how infinitely superior they would all at home have considered that wholesome, capable, good-looking Martha to an empty-headed and useless young man like Philip; and he thought to himself how completely taboo had overlaid in these people’s minds every ethical idea, how wholly it had obscured the prime necessities of healthy, vigorous, and moral manhood.  He recollected the similar though less hideous taboos he had met with elsewhere:  the castes of India, and the horrible pollution that would result from disregarding them; the vile Egyptian rule, by which the divine king, in order to keep up the so-called purity of his royal and god-descended blood,