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92 her aunt or her cousin; or it is her pious duty to go and pay her respects at the heaps of stones beneath which sleep her departed parents. In principle, a male member of the family ought to chaperone her in all these little outings, but, as a matter of fact, he is generally represented by an old woman, a very complaisant old woman too, as a rule, for amongst the Arabs the Rubicon is easily crossed.

Observe, by the way, that it is the women themselves who stickle for this apparent reserve, this rule of never going out, except when closely veiled and properly escorted. To them it represents good form, and they would feel it quite beneath their dignity to dispense with restrictions. When some husband imbued with French ideas, as they call it, tries to modify these tiresome customs in the very slightest degree, he is always dreadfully snubbed, accused of being a wretch, a coward, all manner of horrible things; his wife declares he no longer respects her, he is treating her as if she were a bad woman, or a nomad, or of low caste. And the less the unlucky husband cares about her being always veiled and sequestered, the more she insists upon sticking to every detail of etiquette, for to her these things represent being what the Europeans call a woman of the world, a term capable in the desert, as in France or England, of bearing many different interpretations.

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