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, going back to the old nurse's vituperations and tears and frantic appeals to Allah, the Prophet, and a variety of Moslem saints that reverberated through the Gengizkhani palace from turret to cellar, causing the eunuchs to touch their blue beads as a protection against evil, and the servants huddled over the cook pots to cringe as if expecting a beating, it was perhaps natural enough that the princess, in a moment of exuberant joy, should have obeyed the strange summons without suspecting a trap.

For, after all, a high-caste Oriental girl is in everything except a frank knowledge and discussion of sex questions and a certain familiarity with the tortuous mazes of palace politics, very much like a European or American girl hedged in by the gently nefarious and nefariously gentle, inhibiting social regulations that are the result of the Mid-Victorian inheritance of cant—the world, to both the former and the latter, offering nothing to do except a rather functionless existence varied by calls, genteel literature, genteel athletics, and genteel dusting.

In the case of the European girl, it is the parent who does the step-by-step supervising, while in that