chooses to lay it all down in pheasants. He bought it and paid
for it, so he has a right, I suppose, to do as he likes with it."

"That's the funniest thing of all about these taboos," Bertram
mused, as if half to himself. "The very people whom they injure and
inconvenience the most, the people whom they hamper and cramp and
debar, don't seem to object to them, but believe in them and are
afraid of them. In Samoa, I remember, certain fruits and fish and
animals and so forth were tabooed to the chiefs, and nobody else
ever dared to eat them. They thought it was wrong, and said, if
they did, some nameless evil would at once overtake them. These
nameless terrors, these bodiless superstitions, are always the
deepest. People fight hardest to preserve their bogeys. They fancy
some appalling unknown dissolution would at once result from
reasonable action. I tried one day to persuade a poor devil of a
fellow in Samoa who'd caught one of these fish, and who was
terribly hungry, that no harm would come to him if he cooked it and
ate it. But he was too slavishly frightened to follow my advice;
he said it was taboo to the god-descended chiefs: if a mortal man
tasted it, he would die on the spot: so nothing on earth would
induce him to try it. Though to be sure, even there, nobody ever
went quite so far as to taboo the very soil of earth itself:
everybody might till and hunt where he liked. It's only in Europe,
where evolution goes furthest, that taboo has reached that last
silly pitch of injustice and absurdity. Well, we're not afraid of
the fetich, you and I, Mrs. Monteith. Jump up on the gate; I'll
give you a hand over!" And he held out one strong arm as he spoke
to aid her.

Frida had no such fanatical respect for the bogey of vested