herself, or Cleopatra, or ten little Ptolemies? What was the good of
it?

Not Jinny Jeffries herself could have cast more aspersions upon the
personal value of excavations.

When he was tired of denying to himself that there was anything
unusual the matter with him, he shifted the inner argument and took
up the denial that anything which had happened in Cairo those two
weeks before had anything to do with it. As if that rash encounter
_mattered_! As if he were the silly, senseless sentimental sort of
idiot to go mooning about his work because of a girl--and a girl
from a harem with a taste for secret masquerades and Turkish
marriages!

As if he cared--!

Of course--he admitted this logically and coldly now to himself, as
he sat there in the ray of his excavator's lantern, on the sanded
floor at the end of the Hall of Offerings--of course, he was sorry
for the girl. It was no life for any young girl--especially a
spirited one, with her veins bubbling with French blood.

The system was wrong. If they were going to shut up those girls,
they had no business to bring them up on modern ideas. If they kept
the mashrubiyeh on the windows and the yashmak on their faces they
ought to keep the kohl on their eyes and the henna on their fingers
and education out of their hidden heads.

It was too bad.... But, of course, they were brought up to it. Look