manner in which the British
aristocracy treat their powdered and silk-stockinged menservants.

Margaret felt more at ease on her white donkey, just as she felt more
at ease with pleasant English maidservants than with pompous powdered
footmen. It was a ridiculous simile, but it is the ridiculous which
invades the mind in sublime moments.

While Margaret was finding pleasure in watching the camel and the
Sheikh, or rather, while they were taking their place in her mind with
the air and the sky and the hills and the valley, Michael was certainly
enjoying himself in a more definite criticism of Freddy's sister. He
remembered his friend's remark, "Oh, Meg's all right," and he knew what
he meant.

Her long limbs and boyish figure delighted his artistic eye, while the
white topee hat, with the long blue veil, failed to hide the attractive
carriage of her head. He felt impatient to see her unhatted and
unveiled. Certainly she was not dowdy, nor had she any aggressive
cleverness about her. Indeed, there was something which suggested a
man's directness of mind and a simplicity which was quite unusual and
fascinating. He could almost have laughed aloud when he thought of the
picture which he had conjured up to himself of the Meg who could
"tackle pretty stiff stuff and suck the guts out of a book like a
weasel sucking the blood out of a rabbit."

The dowdy "blue stocking" had vanished, and in her place was a girl as
attractive in her darkness as Freddy was in his fairness.

And so they rode on and on through the Theban hills, bathed in pink
sunlight. The donkey-boys had fallen behind. Their first enthusiastic
effort to show off before the honourable Sitt had quite subsided. They
were discussing her now, in none too delicate a fashion. The elder of
the two boys, who was the son of a dragoman, and hoped one day to
develop into as resplendent a being as his father, was in his way a
great reader. He had just finished an Arabic translation of a French
novel and he was picturing to his friends Margaret as the heroine of
the obscene romance. Poor Margaret!

In Egypt the Arabic translations of low-class French romances, rendered
even more unclean by their translation, have a poisonous effect upon
the minds of the youths who devour them. Margaret, who had admired the
boy's brilliant smiles and beautiful features and teeth, which were
even whiter and more attractive than her brother's, little dreamed, as
they tell behi