CHAPTER XV
In which Hector breaks the seal of the ancient prophecy and finds that blood is thicker than water, thicker than the clogging, stinking dust of the centuries.
Yet, going back to the old nurse's vituperations and tears and frantic appeals to Allah, the Prophet, and a variety of Moslem saints that reverberated through the Gengizkhani palace from turret to cellar, causing the eunuchs to touch their blue beads as a protection against evil, and the servants huddled over the cook pots to cringe as if expecting a beating, it was perhaps natural enough that the princess, in a moment of exuberant joy, should have obeyed the strange summons without suspecting a trap.
For, after all, a high-caste Oriental girl is in everything except a frank knowledge and discussion of sex questions and a certain familiarity with the tortuous mazes of palace politics, very much like a European or American girl hedged in by the gently nefarious and nefariously gentle, inhibiting social regulations that are the result of the Mid-Victorian inheritance of cant—the world, to both the former and the latter, offering nothing to do except a rather functionless existence varied by calls, genteel literature, genteel athletics, and genteel dusting.
In the case of the European girl, it is the parent who does the step-by-step supervising, while in that
