How many times had she written these things in different forms and to
different people--so often, too often, to the British Consul at Cairo,
whose patience waned. At first, the seizure of conscripts, with all that
it involved, had excited her greatly. It had required all her common-
sense to prevent her, then and there, protesting, pleading, with the
kavass, who did the duty of Ismail's Sirdar. She had confined herself,
however, to asking for permission to give the men cigarettes and
slippers, dates and bread, and bags of lentils for soup. Even this was
not unaccompanied by danger, for the Mahommedan mind could not at first
tolerate the idea of a lady going unveiled; only fellah women, domestic
cattle, bared their faces to the world. The conscripts, too, going to
their death--for how few of them ever returned?--leaving behind all hope,
all freedom, passing to starvation and cruelty, at last to be cut down by
the Arab, or left dying of illness in the desert, they took her gifts
with sullen faces. Her beautiful freedom was in such contrast to their
torture, slavery of a direful kind. But as again and again the kavasses
came and opened midnight doors and snatched away the young men, her
influence had grown so fast that her presence brought comfort, and she
helped to assuage the grief of the wailing women. She even urged upon
them that philosophy of their own, which said "Malaish" to all things--
the "It is no matter," of the fated Hamlet. In time she began to be
grateful that an apathetic resignation, akin to the quiet of despair,
was the possession of their race. She was far from aware that something
in their life, of their philosophy, was affecting her understanding.
She had a strong brain and a stronger will, but she had a capacity for
feeling greater still, and this gave her imagination, temperament, and--
though it would have shocked her to know it--a certain credulity, easily
transmutable into superstition. Yet, as her sympathies were, to some
extent, rationalised by stern fact and everlasting custom, her opposition