" Bertram answered warmly. "Your girls here are not
cooped up in actual cages, but they're confined in barrack-schools, as
like prisons as possible; and they're repressed at every turn in every
natural instinct of play or society. They mustn't go here or they
mustn't go there; they mustn't talk to this one or to that one; they
mustn't do this, or that, or the other; their whole life is bound round,
I'm told, by a closely woven web of restrictions and restraints, which
have no other object or end in view than the interests of a purely
hypothetical husband. The Chinese cramp their women's feet to make
them small and useless: you cramp your women's brains for the self-same
purpose. Even light's excluded; for they mustn't read books that would
make them think; they mustn't be allowed to suspect the bare possibility
that the world may be otherwise than as their priests and nurses and
grandmothers tell them, though most even of your own men know it well to
be something quite different. Why, I met a girl at that dance I went to
in London the other evening, who told me she wasn't allowed to read a
book called Tess of the D'Urbervilles, that I'd read myself, and that
seemed to me one of which every young girl and married woman in England
ought to be given a copy. It was the one true book I had seen in your
country. And another girl wasn't allowed to read another book, which
I've since looked at, called Robert Elsmere,--an ephemeral thing enough
in its way, I don't doubt, but proscribed in her case for no other
reason on earth than because it expressed some mild disbelief as to the
exact literary accuracy of those Lower Syrian pamphlets to which your
priests attach such immense importance."

"Oh, Mr. Ingledew," Frida cried, trembling, yet profoundly interested;
"if you talk like that any more, I shan't be able to listen to you."

"There it is, you see," Bertram continued, with a little wave of the
hand. "You've been so blinded and bedimmed by being deprived of light
when a girl, that now, when you see even a very faint ray, it dazzles
you and frightens you. That mustn't be so--it needn't, I feel confident.
I shall have to teach you how to bear the light. Your eyes, I know, are
naturally strong; you were an eagle born: you'd soon get used to it."

Frida lifted them slowly, those beautiful eyes, and met his own with
genuine pleasure.

"Do you think so?" she asked, half whispering. In some dim, instinctive
way she felt this stran