Inside another month, all Washington—the “four hundred”—knew that Mr. Sên and Miss Gilbert had become—to put it nicely—“great friends.” A few were disgusted, most were amused, and not a few were jealous: Reginald Hamilton and a few dozen women. In all the antipathetical bewildering psychology of East and West there is nothing more baffling than the lure of European women to Asiatic men. Know the East longest, search it most tirelessly, grow most in sympathy with it, and still you can see but darkly and not far into that inter-racial puzzle and secret of human nature. The average and the typical men of the Orient are excellent husbands—polygamous?—granted. But what of their women? The “rights” the men denied their wives for centuries of centuries those wives would have resented as insult, spurned as outrage and burden. It is not facile to enfranchise a race, a caste or a sex that will have none of it. Even in Earth’s “freest” country you may coax, or lead or prod a woman to the polling-booth, but you can’t make her vote. Not yet. And in this new day of our greatest enlightenments when enfranchisement is peeping seductively over the shoulders of Oriental women, it is those women who hang back and hesitate, not their husbands and masters who hold them back or coerce them. The Oriental husband is not a tyrant. His wives rule and coerce him oftener than he does one of them. He locks them up in some places, and in some castes. They’d berate and punish him if he did not. The most ruthless ruler Afghanistan ever has had could not control or direct his favorite wife. She over-sat, she over-ate, and she over-smoked very badly indeed. Her physicians protested and warned. The Amir was thoroughly frightened, greatly distressed. He cajoled, he pleaded, he bribed with the moving bribery of pearls and jeweled tissues and thick perfumes, and it is reported that at least twice he wept. But the result was nothing. His wife laughed and pouted and scoffed and defied and calmly and obstinately lolled, ate sweetmeats, and smoked herself to obesity and death.