Page:Letters of a Javanese princess, by Raden Adjeng Kartini, 1921.djvu/81

 if that had been all you had learned so much misery in the future would have been spared you. But the stupid little thing had not made her-self, she couldn't help it if God had given her a sensitive soul, and a heart which readily absorbed all that the Dutch language had helped her to think beautiful.

Poor little one. In her heart. Western thoughts found a joyous entrance, yet she saw herself fettered hand and foot by Eastern tradition. And her muscles were still too weak, too soft to enable her to break the chains which bound her. And later when she found herself strong, so that with a single jerk they could be wrenched asunder—did she do it? But we will not run ahead with the story, we have not gone very far as yet.

The school door lay behind her, and the house of her parents welcomed her to herself. Great was that house, and spacious were the grounds, but high and thick were the walls that surrounded them and the closed in four cornered space was henceforth to be her world, her all. Never mind, how spacious and handsome, even comfortable a cage may be it is still a cage to the little bird that is imprisoned there.

Gone, gone was her merry childhood; gone everything that made her young life happy. She still felt herself such a child, and she was that in fact too, but the law placed her inexorably among the full grown. And she to whom no ditch was too broad to be leapt, no tree too high to be climbed, who loved nothing so much as to run like a wild colt in the meadows, must now be calm, composed and grave, as beseemed a Javanese young lady of a high and noble house. The ideal Javanese girl is silent and expressionless as a wooden doll, speaking only when it is necessary, and then with a little whispering voice which can hardly be heard by an ant; she must walk foot before foot and slowly like a snail, —59—