“And yet,” said Charlie, “you want to change it all, and import into it the newest ideas in religions and the latest Yankee culture. You would like all those mysterious veiled women, with the beautiful eyes, whom you saw to-day, to be turned into learned ladies in tweed frocks and hard hats, with spectacles and short hair.” “No, indeed,” said Cecil, “that is not my ideal at all. A modification of their own style of dress would be much more suitable to them than a bad copy of ours. And they couldn’t all be learned, but they all ought to know a good deal more than they can at present, poor things! If they were only better educated, it would be much easier to introduce reforms Denarien Bey says that most of Ahmed Khémi Pasha’s plans are thwarted by his harem.” Charlie groaned. “I beg your pardon, Miss Anstruther,” he said, “but my feelings were too much for me. An Eastern I can respect, a European I can pity, but a Europeanised, Europeanising Turk like Ahmed Khémi I can only detest.” “I can’t hear my employer spoken against in that way,” said Cecil. “Your employer? So he is. Well, Miss Anstruther, I can forgive him anything, since he is bringing you to Baghdad.” Cecil frowned. “I really cannot imagine,” she said, severely, “how a person like yourself, who admires quiet so intensely, can talk so much.” “That is the fault of the two natures in me,” said Charlie, gravely, though he was inwardly shaking with laughter over this amazing snub. “As a European, I am bound to talk and go on like other people, to be feverishly busy, and if I have no work of my own, to hunt up other people’s and set them at it. Then I get sick of it all, and go off and become an Eastern. Perfect idleness is then my highest idea of happiness, and I am quite content to sit for a whole day in the tent-door with an Arab sheikh, exchanging platitudes on the inevitability of the decrees of fate, at intervals of half an hour.” “But have you ever tried that?” asked Cecil, laughing. “Tried it? I do it periodically, whenever I can get hold of a sufficiently unsophisticated sheikh. It doesn’t do to go to the same people twice. They always find out somehow afterwards who you really are, and spot you the next time. But the desert life is wonderful, simply wonderful! The mere thought of it makes me long to go out there and begin it again this moment. It is so free and irregular. You pass from tremendous exertion to absolute idleness.” “And while you are idle the poor women do all the work,” interrupted Cecil, unkindly. “Yes, that is where Eastern and Western notions clash,” said Charlie. “There must be some drawbacks even to desert life, and one scarcely feels called upon to go about lecturing to the Arabs on the proper treatment of their wives.” He looked at Cecil mischievously, but she declined to be drawn into an argument on the subject of women’s rights, and asked-- “Have you ever spent a really long time in the desert?”