“No, Frida; you may be sure all human beings, you and I alike, and thousands of others a great deal more different, are essential products of this one wee planet, and of particular times and circumstances in its history.  We differ only as birth and circumstances have made us differ.  There is a mystery about who I am, and where I come from; I won’t deny it:  but it isn’t by any means so strange or so marvellous a mystery as you seem to imagine.  One of your own old sacred books says (as I remember hearing in the joss-house I attended one day in London), ’God hath made of one blood all the nations of the earth.’  If for god in that passage we substitute common descent, it’s perfectly true.  We are all of one race; and I confess, when I talk to you, every day I feel our unity more and more profoundly.”  He bent over on the bench and took her tremulous hand.  “Frida,” he said, looking deep into her speaking dark eyes, “don’t you yourself feel it?”

He was so strange, so simple-minded, so different in every way from all other men, that for a moment Frida almost half-forgot to be angry with him.  In point of fact, in her heart, she was not angry at all; she liked to feel the soft pressure of his strong man’s hand on her dainty fingers; she liked to feel the gentle way he was stroking her smooth arm with that delicate white palm of his.  It gave her a certain immediate and unthinking pleasure to sit still by his side and know he was full of her.  Then suddenly, with a start, she remembered her duty:  she was a married woman, and she ought not to do it.  Quickly, with a startled air, she withdrew her hand.  Bertram gazed down at her for a second, half taken aback by her hurried withdrawal.

“Then you don’t like me!” he cried, in a pained tone; “after all, you don’t like me!” One moment later, a ray of recognition broke slowly over his face.  “Oh, I forgot,” he said, leaning away.  “I didn’t mean to annoy you.  A year or two ago, of course, I might have held your hand in mine as long as ever I liked.  You were still a free being.  But what was right then is wrong now, according to the kaleidoscopic etiquette of your countrywomen.  I forgot all that in the heat of the moment.  I recollected only we were two human beings, of the same race and blood, with hearts that beat and hands that lay together.  I remember now, you must hide and stifle your native impulses in future:  you’re tabooed for life to Robert Monteith:  I must needs respect his seal set upon you!”

And he drew a deep sigh of enforced resignation.

Frida sighed in return.  “These problems are so hard,” she said.

Bertram smiled a strange smile.  “There are no problems,” he answered confidently.  “You make them yourselves.  You surround life with taboos, and then—­you talk despairingly of the problems with which your own taboos alone have saddled you.”

IX