'And what'll the American Woman do?'
'She'll sit and cry - and it'll do her good.'
Later on, I met a woman from a certain Western State seeing God's great,
happy, inattentive world for the first time, and rather distressed that
it was not like hers. She had always understood that the English were
brutal to their wives - the papers of her State said so. (If you only
knew the papers of her State I) But she had not noticed any scandalous
treatment so far, and Englishwomen, whom she admitted she would never
understand, seemed to enjoy a certain specious liberty and equality;
while Englishmen were distinctly kind to girls in difficulties over
their baggage and tickets on strange railways. Quite a nice people, she
concluded, but without much sense of humour. One day, she showed me
what looked like a fashion-paper print of a dress-stuff - a pretty oval
medallion of stars on a striped grenadine background that somehow seemed
familiar.
'How nice! What is it?' I asked.
'Our National Flag,' she replied.
'Indeed. But it doesn't look quite - - '
'No. This is a new design for arranging the stars so that they shall be
easier to count and more decorative in effect. We're going to take a
vote on it in our State, where we have the franchise. I shall cast my
vote when I get home.'
'Really! And how will you vote?'
'I'm just thinking that out.' She spread the picture on her knee and
considered it, head to one side, as though it were indeed dress
material.
All this while the land of Egypt marched solemnly beside us on either
hand. The river being low, we saw it from the boat as one long plinth,
twelve to twenty feet high of brownish, purplish mud, visibly upheld
every hundred yards or so by glistening copper caryatides in the shape
of naked men baling water up to the crops above. Behind that bright
emerald line ran the fawn-or tiger-coloured background of desert, and a
pale blue sky closed all. There was Egypt even as the Pharaohs, their
engineers and architects, had seen it - land to cultivate, folk and
cattle for the work, and outside that work no distraction nor allurement
of any kind whatever, save when the dead were taken to their place
beyond the limits of cultivation. When the banks grew lower, one looked
across as much as two miles of green-stuff packed like a toy Noah's-ark
with people, camels, sheep, goats, oxen, buffaloes, and an occasional
horse. The beasts stood as still, too, as the toys, because they were
tethered or hobbled each to his own half-circle of clover, and moved
forward when that was eaten. Only the very little kids were loose, and
these played on the flat mud roofs like kittens.
