Ireland."

"Well, you can't say we've anything answering to that in England,"
Frida put in, looking across at him with her frank, open
countenance.

"No, not quite like that, in detail, perhaps, but pretty much the
same in general principle," Bertram answered warmly. "Your girls
here are not cooped up in actual cages, but they're confined in
barrack-schools, as like prisons as possible; and they're repressed
at every turn in every natural instinct of play or society. They
mustn't go here or they mustn't go there; they mustn't talk to this
one or to that one; they mustn't do this, or that, or the other;
their whole life is bound round, I'm told, by a closely woven web
of restrictions and restraints, which have no other object or end
in view than the interests of a purely hypothetical husband. The
Chinese cramp their women's feet to make them small and useless:
you cramp your women's brains for the self-same purpose. Even
light's excluded; for they mustn't read books that would make them
think; they mustn't be allowed to suspect the bare possibility that
the world may be otherwise than as their priests and nurses and
grandmothers tell them, though most even of your own men know it
well to be something quite different. Why, I met a girl at that
dance I went to in London the other evening, who told me she wasn't
allowed to read a book called Tess of the D'Urbervilles, that I'd
read myself, and that seemed to me one of which every young girl
and married woman in England ought to be given a copy. It was the
one true book I had seen in your country. And another girl wasn't
allowed to read another book, which I've since looked at, called
Robert Elsmere,--an ephemeral thing enough in its way, I don't