hing! How annoying of her!
She might have chosen some other time to go and die, I'm sure, than just
when she knew I wanted to go to Exeter!"

"Well, if it would be any convenience to you," Bertram put in with a
serious face, "I'm rather busy on Wednesday; but I could manage to take
up a portmanteau to town with my dress things in the morning, meet the
girls at Paddington, and run down by the evening express in time to go
with them to the hotel you meant to stop at. They're those two pretty
blondes I met here at tea last Sunday, aren't they?"

Frida looked at him, half-incredulous. He was very nice, she knew, and
very quaint and fresh and unsophisticated and unconventional; but could
he be really quite so ignorant of the common usages of civilised society
as to suppose it possible he could run down alone with two young girls
to stop by themselves, without even a chaperon, at an hotel at Exeter?
She gazed at him curiously. "Oh, Mr. Ingledew," she said, "now you're
really TOO ridiculous!"

Bertram coloured up like a boy. If she had been in any doubt before
as to his sincerity and simplicity, she could be so no longer. "Oh, I
forgot about the taboo," he said. "I'm so sorry I hurt you. I was only
thinking what a pity those two nice girls should be cheated out of their
expected pleasure by a silly question of pretended mourning, where even
you yourself, who have got to wear it, don't assume that you feel the
slightest tinge of sorrow. I remember now, of course, what a lady told
me in London the other day: your young girls aren't even allowed to go
out travelling alone without their mother or brothers, in order to taboo
them absolutely beforehand for the possible husband who may some day
marry them. It was a pitiful tale. I thought it all most painful and
shocking."

"But you don't mean to say," Frida cried, equally shocked and astonished
in her turn, "that you'd let young girls go out alone anywhere with
unmarried men? Goodness gracious, how dreadful!"

"Why not?" Bertram asked, with transparent simplicity.

"Why, just consider the consequences!" Frida exclaimed, with a blush,
after a moment's hesitation.

"There couldn't be ANY consequences, unless they both liked and
respected one another," Bertram answered in the most matter-of-course
voice in the world; "and if they do that, we think at home it's nobody's
business to interfere in any way with the free expression of their
individuality, in this the most sacred and