age, 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, must marry his own sister, and so foully
pollute with monstrous abortions the very stock he believed himself to
be preserving intact from common or unclean influences. His mind ran
back to the strange and complicated forbidden degrees of the Australian
Blackfellows, who are divided into cross-classes, each of which must
necessarily marry into a certain other, and into that other only,
regardless of individual tastes or preferences. He remembered the
profound belief of all these people that if they were to act in any
other way than the one prescribed, some nameless misfortune or terrible
evil would surely overtake them. Yet, nowhere, he thought to himself,
had he seen any system which entailed in the end so much misery on both
sexes, though more particularly on the women, as that system of closely
tabooed m