LETTERS OF A JAVANESE PRINCESS
no reason why she should be submissive to him. She was not answer- able to any one, only to her own eonscience and her own heart. She would never give in to her brother except when she was convinced that he was right.
At first he was astonished, and later he grew angry, when he saw that a little girl who was half a dozen years younger than he dared to defy his will. She must be forcibly suppressed. Everything was wrong that Ni did. She was severely reprimanded for each little fault. No day passed that brother and sister did not stand facing each other in anger. He with a dark countenence and stem words that made her heart bleed, and she with quivering lips tremblingly defending her good right to do something which he wished to forbid.
She was entirely alone in her fight against the despotism of her brother — her future protector, whenever she should have the misfortune to lose her parents, until she should leave his roof under the protection of the man for whom God had created her! He took very good care not to torment her when her father was there; father would never have allowed it, and he knew well that she was too proud to tell.
But the others who lived in the house were silent too, although they knew that she was within her rights. It would not do to allow impertinence, and the girl was impertinent; young as she was, she dared to say "No" to the "Yes" of her so much older brother. A girl had no right to do anything which would even partially detract from the importance of a man. It was not right for this girl to oppose her ideas to those of her self-willed brother.
In later years, when Ni remembered all this, she could understand very well why the man was so egotistical. Always, by every one in the house, he was taught as a child to be selfish, by his mother most of all. From childhood he was taught to regard the girl, the woman, as a
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