Produced by Sue Asscher

THE POOL IN THE DESERT

By Sara Jeanette Duncan

Contents

    1.  A Mother in India.

    2.  An Impossible Ideal.

    3.  The Hesitation of Miss Anderson.

    4.  The Pool in the Desert.

1. A Mother in India

Chapter 1.I

There were times when we had to go without puddings to pay John's
uniform bills, and always I did the facings myself with a cloth-ball to
save getting new ones. I would have polished his sword, too, if I had
been allowed; I adored his sword. And once, I remember, we painted and
varnished our own dog-cart, and very smart it looked, to save fifty
rupees. We had nothing but our pay--John had his company when we were
married, but what is that?--and life was made up of small knowing
economies, much more amusing in recollection than in practise. We were
sodden poor, and that is a fact, poor and conscientious, which was
worse. A big fat spider of a money-lender came one day into the veranda
and tempted us--we lived in a hut, but it had a veranda--and John
threatened to report him to the police. Poor when everybody else had
enough to live in the open-handed Indian fashion, that was what made it
so hard; we were alone in our sordid little ways. When the expectation
of Cecily came to us we made out to be delighted, knowing that the whole
station pitied us, and when Cecily came herself, with a swamping burst
of expense, we kept up the pretense splendidly. She was peevish, poor
little thing, and she threatened convulsions from the beginning, but we
both knew that it was abnormal not to love her a great deal, more than
life, immediately and increasingly; and we applied ourselves honestly to
do it, with the thermometer at a hundred and two, and the nurse leaving
at the end of a fortnight because she discovered that I had only six
of everything for the table. To find out a husband's virtues, you must
marry a poor man. The regiment was under-officered as usual, and John
had to take parade at daylight quite three times a week; but he walked
up and down the veranda with Cecily constantly till two in the morning,
when a little coolness came. I usually lay awake the rest of the
night in fear that a scorpion would drop from the ceiling on her.
Nevertheless, we were of excellent mind towards Cecily; we were in such
terror, not so much of failing in our duty towards her as towards the
ideal standard of mankind. We were very anxious indeed not to come
short. To be found too small for one's place in nature would have been
odious. We would talk about her for an hour at a time, even when John's
charger was threatening glanders and I could see his mind perpetually
wandering to the stable. I would say to John that she had brought a new
element into our lives--she had indeed!--and John would reply, 'I know
what you mean,' and go on to prophesy that she would 'bind us together.'
We didn't need binding together; we were more to each other, there in
the desolation of that arid frontier outpost, than most husbands and
wives; but it seemed a proper and hopeful thing to believe, so we
believed it. Of course, the real experience would have come, we weren't
monsters; but fate curtailed the opportunity. She was just five
weeks old when the doctor told us that we must either pack her home
immediately or lose her, and the very next day John went down with
enteric. So Cecily was sent to England with a sergeant's wife who had
lost her twins, and I settled down under the direction of a native
doctor, to fight for my husband's life, without ice or proper food, or
sickroom comforts of any sort. Ah! Fort Samila, with the sun glaring up
from the sand!--however, it is a long time ago now. I trusted the baby
willingly to Mrs. Berry and to Providence, and did not fret; my capacity
for worry, I suppose, was completely absorbed. Mrs. Berry's letter,
describing the child's improvement on the voyage and safe arrival came,
I remember, the day on which John was allowed his first solid mouthful;
it had been a long siege. 'Poor little wretch!' he said when I read it
aloud; and after that Cecily became an episode.

She had gone to my husband's people; it was the best arrangement. We
were lucky that it was possible; so many children had to be sent to
strangers and hirelings. Since an unfortunate infant must be brought
into the world and set adrift, the haven of its grandmother and its Aunt
Emma and its Aunt Alice certainly seemed providential. I had absolutely
no cause for anxiety, as I often told people, wondering that I did
not feel a little all the same. Nothing, I knew, could exceed the
conscientious devotion of all three Farnham ladies to the child. She
would appear upon their somewhat barren horizon as a new and interesting
duty, and the small additional income she also represented would be
almost nominal compensation for the care she would receive. They were
excellent persons of the kind that talk about matins and vespers, and
attend both. They helped little charities and gave little teas,
and wrote little notes, and made deprecating allowance for the
eccentricities of their titled or moneyed acquaintances. They were the
subdued, smiling, unimaginatively dressed women on a small definite
income that you meet at every rectory garden-party in the country, a
little snobbish, a little priggish, wholly conventional, but apart from
these weaknesses, sound and simple and dignified, managing their two
small servants with a display of the most exact traditions, and keeping
a somewhat vague and belated but constant eye upon the doings of their
country as chronicled in a bi-weekly paper. They were all immensely
interested in royalty, and would read paragraphs aloud to each other
about how the Princess Beatrice or the Princess Maud had opened a fancy
bazaar, looking remarkably well in plain grey poplin trimmed with Irish
lace--an industry which, as is well known, the Royal Family has set its
heart on rehabilitating. Upon which Mrs. Farnham's comment invariably
would be, 'How thoughtful of them, dear!' and Alice would usually say,
'Well, if I were a princess, I should like something nicer than plain
grey poplin.' Alice, being the youngest, was not always expected to
think before she spoke. Alice painted in water-colours, but Emma was
supposed to have the most common sense.

They took turns in writing to us with the greatest regularity about
Cecily; only once, I think, did they miss the weekly mail, and that was
when she threatened diphtheria and they thought we had better be kept
in ignorance. The kind and affectionate terms of these letters never
altered except with the facts they described--teething, creeping,
measles, cheeks growing round and rosy, all were conveyed in the same
smooth, pat, and proper phrases, so absolutely empty of any glimpse
of the child's personality that after the first few months it was like
reading about a somewhat uninteresting infant in a book. I was sure
Cecily was not uninteresting, but her chroniclers were. We used to wade
through the long, thin sheets and saw how much more satisfactory it
would be when Cecily could write to us herself. Meanwhile we noted her
weekly progress with much the feeling one would have about a far-away
little bit of property that was giving no trouble and coming on
exceedingly well. We would take possession of Cecily at our convenience;
till then, it was gratifying to hear of our unearned increment in dear
little dimples and sweet little curls.

She was nearly four when I saw her again. We were home on three months'
leave; John had just got his first brevet for doing something which he
does not allow me to talk about in the Black Mountain country; and we
were fearfully pleased with ourselves. I remember that excitement lasted
well up to Port Said. As far as the Canal, Cecily was only one of the
pleasures and interests we were going home to: John's majority was
the thing that really gave savour to life. But the first faint line of
Europe brought my child to my horizon; and all the rest of the way she
kept her place, holding out her little arms to me, beckoning me on. Her
four motherless years brought compunction to my heart and tears to my
eyes; she should have all the compensation that could be. I suddenly
realized how ready I was--how ready!--to have her back. I rebelled
fiercely against John's decision that we must not take her with us on
our return to the frontier; privately, I resolved to dispute it, and, if
necessary, I saw myself abducting the child--my own child. My days and
nights as the ship crept on were full of a long ache to possess her; the
defrauded tenderness of the last four years rose up in me and sometimes
caught at my throat. I could think and talk and dream of nothing else.
John indulged me as much as was reasonable, and only once betrayed by a
yawn that the subject was not for him endlessly absorbing. Then I cried
and he apologized. 'You know,' he said, 'it isn't exactly the same
thing. I'm not her mother.' At which I dried my tears and expanded,
proud and pacified. I was her mother!

Then the rainy little station and Alice, all-embracing in a damp
waterproof, and the drive in the fly, and John's mother at the gate and
a necessary pause while I kissed John's mother. Dear thing, she wanted
to hold our hands and look into our faces and tell us how little we had
changed for all our hardships; and on the way to the house she actually
stopped to point out some alterations in the flower-borders. At last the
drawing-room door and the smiling housemaid turning the handle and the
unforgettable picture of a little girl, a little girl unlike anything we
had imagined, starting bravely to trot across the room with the little
speech that had been taught her. Half-way she came; I suppose our
regards were too fixed, too absorbed, for there she stopped with a
wail of terror at the strange faces, and ran straight back to the
outstretched arms of her Aunt Emma. The most natural thing in the
world, no doubt. I walked over to a chair opposite with my hand-bag and
umbrella and sat down--a spectator, aloof and silent. Aunt Emma fondled
and quieted the child, apologizing for her to me, coaxing her to look
up, but the little figure still shook with sobs, hiding its face in
the bosom that it knew. I smiled politely, like any other stranger,
at Emma's deprecations, and sat impassive, looking at my alleged baby
breaking her heart at the sight of her mother. It is not amusing even
now to remember the anger that I felt. I did not touch her or speak to
her; I simply sat observing my alien possession, in the frock I had
not made and the sash I had not chosen, being coaxed and kissed and
protected and petted by its Aunt Emma. Presently I asked to be taken to
my room, and there I locked myself in for two atrocious hours. Just once
my heart beat high, when a tiny knock came and a timid, docile little
voice said that tea was ready. But I heard the rustle of a skirt, and
guessed the directing angel in Aunt Emma, and responded, 'Thank you,
dear, run away and say that I am coming,' with a pleasant visitor's
inflection which I was able to sustain for the rest of afternoon.

'She goes to bed at seven,' said Emma.

'Oh, does she?' said I. 'A very good hour, I should think.'

'She sleeps in my room,' said Mrs. Farnham.

'We give her mutton broth very often, but seldom stock soup,' said Aunt
Emma. 'Mamma thinks it is too stimulating.'

'Indeed?' said I, to all of it.

They took me up to see her in her crib, and pointed out, as she lay
asleep, that though she had 'a general look' of me, her features were
distinctively Farnham.

'Won't you kiss her?' asked Alice. 'You haven't kissed her yet, and she
is used to so much affection.'

'I don't think I could take such an advantage of her,' I said.

They looked at each other, and Mrs. Farnham said that I was plainly worn
out. I mustn't sit up to prayers.

If I had been given anything like reasonable time I might have made
a fight for it, but four weeks--it took a month each way in those
days--was too absurdly little; I could do nothing. But I would not
stay at mamma's. It was more than I would ask of myself, that daily
disappointment under the mask of gratified discovery, for long.

I spent an approving, unnatural week, in my farcical character, bridling
my resentment and hiding my mortification with pretty phrases; and then
I went up to town and drowned my sorrows in the summer sales. I took
John with me. I may have been Cecily's mother in theory, but I was
John's wife in fact.

We went back to the frontier, and the regiment saw a lot of service.
That meant medals and fun for my husband, but economy and anxiety for
me, though I managed to be allowed as close to the firing line as any
woman.

Once the Colonel's wife and I, sitting in Fort Samila, actually heard
the rifles of a punitive expedition cracking on the other side of
the river--that was a bad moment. My man came in after fifteen hours'
fighting, and went sound asleep, sitting before his food with his knife
and fork in his hands. But service makes heavy demands besides those
on your wife's nerves. We had saved two thousand rupees, I remember,
against another run home, and it all went like powder, in the Mirzai
expedition; and the run home diminished to a month in a boarding-house
in the hills.

Meanwhile, however, we had begun to correspond with our daughter, in
large round words of one syllable, behind which, of course, was
plain the patient guiding hand of Aunt Emma. One could hear Aunt Emma
suggesting what would be nice to say, trying to instil a little pale
affection for the far-off papa and mamma. There was so little Cecily and
so much Emma--of course, it could not be otherwise--that I used to take,
I fear, but a perfunctory joy in these letters. When we went home again
I stipulated absolutely that she was to write to us without any sort of
supervision--the child was ten.

'But the spelling!' cried Aunt Emma, with lifted eyebrows.

'Her letters aren't exercises,' I was obliged to retort; 'she will do
the best she can.'

We found her a docile little girl, with nice manners, a thoroughly
unobjectionable child. I saw quite clearly that I could not have brought
her up so well; indeed, there were moments when I fancied that Cecily,
contrasting me with her aunts, wondered a little what my bringing up
could have been like. With this reserve of criticism on Cecily's part,
however, we got on very tolerably, largely because I found it impossible
to assume any responsibility towards her, and in moments of doubt or
discipline referred her to her aunts. We spent a pleasant summer with
a little girl in the house whose interest in us was amusing, and whose
outings it was gratifying to arrange; but when we went back, I had no
desire to take her with us. I thought her very much better where she
was.

Then came the period which is filled, in a subordinate degree, with
Cecily's letters. I do not wish to claim more than I ought; they were
not my only or even my principal interest in life. It was a long
period; it lasted till she was twenty-one. John had had promotion in the
meantime, and there was rather more money, but he had earned his second
brevet with a bullet through one lung, and the doctors ordered our leave
to be spent in South Africa. We had photographs, we knew she had
grown tall and athletic and comely, and the letters were always very
creditable. I had the unusual and qualified privilege of watching my
daughter's development from ten to twenty-one, at a distance of
four thousand miles, by means of the written word. I wrote myself as
provocatively as possible; I sought for every string, but the vibration
that came back across the seas to me was always other than the one I
looked for, and sometimes there was none. Nevertheless, Mrs. Farnham
wrote me that Cecily very much valued my communications. Once when I had
described an unusual excursion in a native state, I learned that she
had read my letter aloud to the sewing circle. After that I abandoned
description, and confined myself to such intimate personal details as no
sewing circle could find amusing. The child's own letters were simply
a mirror of the ideas of the Farnham ladies; that must have been so,
it was not altogether my jaundiced eye. Alice and Emma and grandmamma
paraded the pages in turn. I very early gave up hope of discoveries
in my daughter, though as much of the original as I could detect was
satisfactorily simple and sturdy. I found little things to criticize,
of course, tendencies to correct; and by return post I criticized and
corrected, but the distance and the deliberation seemed to touch my
maxims with a kind of arid frivolity, and sometimes I tore them up. One
quick, warm-blooded scolding would have been worth a sheaf of them. My
studied little phrases could only inoculate her with a dislike for me
without protecting her from anything under the sun.

However, I found she didn't dislike me, when John and I went home at
last to bring her out. She received me with just a hint of kindness,
perhaps, but on the whole very well.

Chapter 1.II

John was recalled, of course, before the end of our furlough, which
knocked various things on the head; but that is the sort of thing one
learned to take with philosophy in any lengthened term of Her Majesty's
service. Besides, there is usually sugar for the pill; and in this case
it was a Staff command bigger than anything we expected for at least
five years to come. The excitement of it when it was explained to her
gave Cecily a charming colour. She took a good deal of interest in the
General, her papa; I think she had an idea that his distinction would
alleviate the situation in India, however it might present itself. She
accepted that prospective situation calmly; it had been placed before
her all her life. There would always be a time when she should go and
live with papa and mamma in India, and so long as she was of an age to
receive the idea with rebel tears she was assured that papa and mamma
would give her a pony. The pony was no longer added to the prospect; it
was absorbed no doubt in the general list of attractions calculated
to reconcile a young lady to a parental roof with which she had no
practical acquaintance. At all events, when I feared the embarrassment
and dismay of a pathetic parting with darling grandmamma and the
aunties, and the sweet cat and the dear vicar and all the other objects
of affection, I found an agreeable unexpected philosophy.

I may add that while I anticipated such broken-hearted farewells I
was quite prepared to take them easily. Time, I imagined, had brought
philosophy to me also, equally agreeable and equally unexpected.

It was a Bombay ship, full of returning Anglo-Indians. I looked up and
down the long saloon tables with a sense of relief and of solace; I
was again among my own people. They belonged to Bengal and to Burma, to
Madras and to the Punjab, but they were all my people. I could pick out
a score that I knew in fact, and there were none that in imagination I
didn't know. The look of wider seas and skies, the casual experienced
glance, the touch of irony and of tolerance, how well I knew it and how
well I liked it! Dear old England, sitting in our wake, seemed to hold
by comparison a great many soft, unsophisticated people, immensely
occupied about very particular trifles. How difficult it had been, all
the summer, to be interested! These of my long acquaintance belonged to
my country's Executive, acute, alert, with the marks of travail on them.
Gladly I went in and out of the women's cabins and listened to the argot
of the men; my own ruling, administering, soldiering little lot.

Cecily looked at them askance. To her the atmosphere was alien, and I
perceived that gently and privately she registered objections. She
cast a disapproving eye upon the wife of a Conservator of Forests, who
scanned with interest a distant funnel and laid a small wager that it
belonged to the Messageries Maritimes. She looked with a straightened
lip at the crisply stepping women who walked the deck in short and
rather shabby skirts with their hands in their jacket-pockets
talking transfers and promotions; and having got up at six to make
a water-colour sketch of the sunrise, she came to me in profound
indignation to say that she had met a man in his pyjamas; no doubt; poor
wretch, on his way to be shaved. I was unable to convince her he was not
expected to visit the barber in all his clothes.

At the end of the third day she told me that she wished these people
wouldn't talk to her; she didn't like them. I had turned in the hour we
left the Channel and had not left my berth since, so possibly I was not
in the most amiable mood to receive a douche of cold water. 'I must try
to remember, dear,' I said, 'that you have been brought up altogether in
the society of pussies and vicars and elderly ladies, and of course you
miss them. But you must have a little patience. I shall be up tomorrow,
if this beastly sea continues to go down; and then we will try to find
somebody suitable to introduce to you.'

'Thank you, mamma,' said my daughter, without a ray of suspicion. Then
she added consideringly, 'Aunt Emma and Aunt Alice do seem quite elderly
ladies beside you, and yet you are older than either of them aren't you?
I wonder how that is.'

It was so innocent, so admirable, that I laughed at my own expense;
while Cecily, doing her hair, considered me gravely. 'I wish you would
tell me why you laugh, mamma,' quoth she; 'you laugh so often.'

We had not to wait after all for my good offices of the next morning.
Cecily came down at ten o'clock that night quite happy and excited; she
had been talking to a bishop, such a dear bishop. The bishop had been
showing her his collection of photographs, and she had promised to play
the harmonium for him at the eleven-o'clock service in the morning.
'Bless me!' said I, 'is it Sunday?' It seemed she had got on very well
indeed with the bishop, who knew the married sister, at Tunbridge,
of her very greatest friend. Cecily herself did not know the married
sister, but that didn't matter--it was a link. The bishop was charming.
'Well, my love,' said I--I was teaching myself to use these forms of
address for fear she would feel an unkind lack of them, but it was
difficult--'I am glad that somebody from my part of the world has
impressed you favourably at last. I wish we had more bishops.'

'Oh, but my bishop doesn't belong to your part of the world,' responded
my daughter sleepily. 'He is travelling for his health.'

It was the most unexpected and delightful thing to be packed into one's
chair next morning by Dacres Tottenham. As I emerged from the music
saloon after breakfast--Cecily had stayed below to look over her hymns
and consider with her bishop the possibility of an anthem--Dacres's face
was the first I saw; it simply illuminated, for me, that portion of the
deck. I noticed with pleasure the quick toss of the cigar overboard as
he recognized and bore down upon me. We were immense friends; John liked
him too. He was one of those people who make a tremendous difference;
in all our three hundred passengers there could be no one like him,
certainly no one whom I could be more glad to see. We plunged at once
into immediate personal affairs, we would get at the heart of them
later. He gave his vivid word to everything he had seen and done;
we laughed and exclaimed and were silent in a concert of admirable
understanding. We were still unravelling, still demanding and explaining
when the ship's bell began to ring for church, and almost simultaneously
Cecily advanced towards us. She had a proper Sunday hat on, with flowers
under the brim, and a church-going frock; she wore gloves and clasped a
prayer-book. Most of the women who filed past to the summons of the bell
were going down as they were, in cotton blouses and serge skirts, in
tweed caps or anything, as to a kind of family prayers. I knew exactly
how they would lean against the pillars of the saloon during the psalms.
This young lady would be little less than a rebuke to them. I surveyed
her approach; she positively walked as if it were Sunday.

'My dear,' I said, 'how endimanchee you look! The bishop will be very
pleased with you. This gentleman is Mr. Tottenham, who administers
Her Majesty's pleasure in parts of India about Allahabad. My daughter,
Dacres.' She was certainly looking very fresh, and her calm grey eyes
had the repose in them that has never known itself to be disturbed about
anything. I wondered whether she bowed so distantly also because it was
Sunday, and then I remembered that Dacres was a young man, and that
the Farnham ladies had probably taught her that it was right to be very
distant with young men.

'It is almost eleven, mamma.'

'Yes, dear. I see you are going to church.'

'Are you not coming, mamma?'

I was well wrapped up in an extremely comfortable corner. I had 'La
Duchesse Bleue' uncut in my lap, and an agreeable person to talk to. I
fear that in any case I should not been inclined to attend the service,
but there was something in my daughter's intonation that made me
distinctly hostile to the idea. I am putting things down as they were,
extenuating nothing.

'I think not, dear.'

'I've turned up two such nice seats.'

'Stay, Miss Farnham, and keep us in countenance,' said Dacres, with
his charming smile. The smile displaced a look of discreet and amused
observation. Dacres had an eye always for a situation, and this one was
even newer to him than to me.

'No, no. She must run away and not bully her mamma,' I said. 'When she
comes back we will see how much she remembers of the sermon;' and as
the flat tinkle from the companion began to show signs of diminishing,
Cecily, with one grieved glance, hastened down.

'You amazing lady!' said Dacres. 'A daughter--and such a tall daughter!
I somehow never--'

'You knew we had one?'

'There was theory of that kind, I remember, about ten years ago. Since
then--excuse me--I don't think you've mentioned her.'

'You talk as if she were a skeleton in the closet!'

'You DIDN'T talk--as if she were.'

'I think she was, in a way, poor child. But the resurrection day hasn't
confounded me as I deserved. She's a very good girl.'

'If you had asked me to pick out your daughter--'

'She would have been the last you would indicate! Quite so,' I said.
'She is like her father's people. I can't help that.'

'I shouldn't think you would if you could,' Dacres remarked absently;
but the sea air, perhaps, enabled me to digest his thoughtlessness with
a smile.

'No,' I said, 'I am just as well pleased. I think a resemblance to me
would confuse me, often.'

There was a trace of scrutiny in Dacres's glance. 'Don't you find
yourself in sympathy with her?' he asked.

'My dear boy, I have seen her just twice in twenty-one years! You see,
I've always stuck to John.'

'But between mother and daughter--I may be old-fashioned, but I had an
idea that there was an instinct that might be depended on.'

'I am depending on it,' I said, and let my eyes follow the little blue
waves that chased past the hand-rail. 'We are making very good speed,
aren't we? Thirty-five knots since last night at ten. Are you in the
sweep?'

'I never bet on the way out--can't afford it. Am I old-fashioned?' he
insisted.

'Probably. Men are very slow in changing their philosophy about women. I
fancy their idea of the maternal relation is firmest fixed of all.'

'We see it a beatitude!' he cried.

'I know,' I said wearily, 'and you never modify the view.'

Dacres contemplated the portion of the deck that lay between us. His
eyes were discreetly lowered, but I saw embarrassment and speculation
and a hint of criticism in them.

'Tell me more about it,' said he.

'Oh, for heaven's sake don't be sympathetic!' I exclaimed. 'Lend me a
little philosophy instead. There is nothing to tell. There she is and
there I am, in the most intimate relation in the world, constituted
when she is twenty-one and I am forty.' Dacres started slightly at the
ominous word; so little do men realize that the women they like can ever
pass out of the constated years of attraction. 'I find the young
lady very tolerable, very creditable, very nice. I find the relation
atrocious. There you have it. I would like to break the relation into
pieces,' I went on recklessly, 'and throw it into the sea. Such things
should be tempered to one. I should feel it much less if she occupied
another cabin, and would consent to call me Elizabeth or Jane. It is not
as if I had been her mother always. One grows fastidious at forty--new
intimacies are only possible then on a basis of temperament--'

I paused; it seemed to me that I was making excuses, and I had not the
least desire in the world to do that.

'How awfully rough on the girl!' said Dacres Tottenham.

'That consideration has also occurred to me,' I said candidly, 'though I
have perhaps been even more struck by its converse.'

'You had no earthly business to be her mother,' said my friend, with
irritation.

I shrugged my shoulders--what would you have done?--and opened 'La
Duchesse Bleue'.

Chapter 1.III

Mrs. Morgan, wife of a judge of the High Court of Bombay, and I sat
amidships on the cool side in the Suez Canal. She was outlining 'Soiled
Linen' in chain-stitch on a green canvas bag; I was admiring the
Egyptian sands. 'How charming,' said I, 'is this solitary desert in the
endless oasis we are compelled to cross!'

'Oasis in the desert, you mean,' said Mrs. Morgan; 'I haven't noticed
any, but I happened to look up this morning as I was putting on my
stockings, and I saw through my port-hole the most lovely mirage.'

I had been at school with Mrs. Morgan more than twenty years agone, but
she had come to the special enjoyment of the dignities of life while I
still liked doing things. Mrs. Morgan was the kind of person to make
one realize how distressing a medium is middle age. Contemplating her
precipitous lap, to which conventional attitudes were certainly more
becoming, I crossed my own knees with energy, and once more resolved to
be young until I was old.

'How perfectly delightful for you to be taking Cecily out!' said Mrs.
Morgan placidly.

'Isn't it?' I responded, watching the gliding sands.

'But she was born in sixty-nine--that makes her twenty-one. Quite time,
I should say.'

'Oh, we couldn't put it off any longer. I mean--her father has such a
horror of early debuts. He simply would not hear of her coming before.'

'Doesn't want her to marry in India, I dare say--the only one,' purred
Mrs. Morgan.

'Oh, I don't know. It isn't such a bad place. I was brought out there to
marry, and I married. I've found it very satisfactory.'

'You always did say exactly what you thought, Helena,' said Mrs. Morgan
excusingly.

'I haven't much patience with people who bring their daughters out to
give them the chance they never would have in England, and then go about
devoutly hoping they won't marry in India,' I said. 'I shall be very
pleased if Cecily does as well as your girls have done.'

'Mary in the Indian Civil and Jessie in the Imperial Service Troops,'
sighed Mrs. Morgan complacently. 'And both, my dear, within a year. It
WAS a blow.'

'Oh, it must have been!' I said civilly.

There was no use in bandying words with Emily Morgan.

'There is nothing in the world like the satisfaction and pleasure one
takes in one's daughters,' Mrs. Morgan went on limpidly. 'And one can be
in such CLOSE sympathy with one's girls. I have never regretted having
no sons.'

'Dear me, yes. To watch oneself growing up again--call back the lovely
April of one's prime, etcetera--to read every thought and anticipate
every wish--there is no more golden privilege in life, dear Emily.
Such a direct and natural avenue for affection, such a wide field for
interest!'

I paused, lost in the volume of my admirable sentiments.

'How beautifully you talk, Helena! I wish I had the gift.'

'It doesn't mean very much,' I said truthfully.

'Oh, I think it's everything! And how companionable a girl is! I quite
envy you, this season, having Cecily constantly with you and taking her
about everywhere. Something quite new for you, isn't it?'

'Absolutely,' said I; 'I am looking forward to it immensely. But it
is likely she will make her own friends, don't you think?' I added
anxiously.

'Hardly the first season. My girls didn't. I was practically their only
intimate for months. Don't be afraid; you won't be obliged to go shares
in Cecily with anybody for a good long while,' added Mrs. Morgan kindly.
'I know just how you feel about THAT.'

The muddy water of the Ditch chafed up from under us against its banks
with a smell that enabled me to hide the emotions Mrs. Morgan evoked
behind my handkerchief. The pale desert was pictorial with the drifting,
deepening purple shadows of clouds, and in the midst a blue glimmer of
the Bitter Lakes, with a white sail on them. A little frantic Arab boy
ran alongside keeping pace with the ship. Except for the smell, it was
like a dream, we moved so quietly; on, gently on and on between the
ridgy clay banks and the rows of piles. Peace was on the ship; you could
hear what the Fourth in his white ducks said to the quartermaster in
his blue denims; you could count the strokes of the electric bell in the
wheel-house; peace was on the ship as she pushed on, an ever-venturing,
double-funneled impertinence, through the sands of the ages. My eyes
wandered along a plank-line in the deck till they were arrested by a
petticoat I knew, when they returned of their own accord. I seemed to be
always seeing that petticoat.

'I think,' resumed Mrs. Morgan, whose glance had wandered in the same
direction, 'that Cecily is a very fine type of our English girls.
With those dark grey eyes, a LITTLE prominent possibly, and that good
colour--it's rather high now perhaps, but she will lose quite enough
of it in India--and those regular features, she would make a splendid
Britannia. Do you know, I fancy she must have a great deal of character.
Has she?'

'Any amount. And all of it good,' I responded, with private dejection.

'No faults at all?' chaffed Mrs. Morgan.

I shook my head. 'Nothing,' I said sadly, 'that I can put my finger on.
But I hope to discover a few later. The sun may bring them out.'

'Like freckles. Well, you are a lucky woman. Mine had plenty, I assure
you. Untidiness was no name for Jessie, and Mary--I'm SORRY to say that
Mary sometimes fibbed.'

'How lovable of her! Cecily's neatness is a painful example to me, and I
don't believe she would tell a fib to save my life.'

'Tell me,' said Mrs. Morgan, as the lunch-bell rang and she gathered her
occupation into her work-basket, 'who is that talking to her?'

'Oh, an old friend,' I replied easily; 'Dacres Tottenham, a dear fellow,
and most benevolent. He is trying on my behalf to reconcile her to the
life she'll have to lead in India.'

'She won't need much reconciling, if she's like most girls,' observed
Mrs. Morgan, 'but he seems to be trying very hard.'

That was quite the way I took it--on my behalf--for several days. When
people have understood you very adequately for ten years you do not
expect them to boggle at any problem you may present at the end of the
decade. I thought Dacres was moved by a fine sense of compassion. I
thought that with his admirable perception he had put a finger on the
little comedy of fruitfulness in my life that laughed so bitterly at
the tragedy of the barren woman, and was attempting, by delicate
manipulation, to make it easier. I really thought so. Then I observed
that myself had preposterously deceived me, that it wasn't like that at
all. When Mr. Tottenham joined us, Cecily and me, I saw that he listened
more than he talked, with an ear specially cocked to register any small
irony which might appear in my remarks to my daughter. Naturally he
registered more than there were, to make up perhaps for dear Cecily's
obviously not registering any. I could see, too, that he was suspicious
of any flavour of kindness; finally, to avoid the strictures of his
upper lip, which really, dear fellow, began to bore me, I talked
exclusively about the distant sails and the Red Sea littoral. When he
no longer joined us as we sat or walked together, I perceived that his
hostility was fixed and his parti pris. He was brimful of compassion,
but it was all for Cecily, none for the situation or for me. (She would
have marvelled, placidly, why he pitied her. I am glad I can say that.)
The primitive man in him rose up as Pope of nature and excommunicated
me as a creature recusant to her functions. Then deliberately Dacres
undertook an office of consolation; and I fell to wondering, while
Mrs. Morgan spoke her convictions plainly out, how far an impulse of
reparation for a misfortune with which he had nothing to do might carry
a man.

I began to watch the affair with an interest which even to me seemed
queer. It was not detached, but it was semi-detached, and, of course,
on the side for which I seem, in this history, to be perpetually
apologizing. With certain limitations it didn't matter an atom whom
Cecily married. So that he was sound and decent, with reasonable
prospects, her simple requirements and ours for her would be quite met.
There was the ghost of a consolation in that; one needn't be anxious or
exacting.

I could predict with a certain amount of confidence that in her first
season she would probably receive three or four proposals, any one of
which she might accept with as much propriety and satisfaction as any
other one. For Cecily it was so simple; prearranged by nature like her
digestion, one could not see any logical basis for difficulties. A nice
upstanding sapper, a dashing Bengal Lancer--oh, I could think of half
a dozen types that would answer excellently. She was the kind of young
person, and that was the summing up of it, to marry a type and be
typically happy. I hoped and expected that she would. But Dacres!

Dacres should exercise the greatest possible discretion. He was not
a person who could throw the dice indifferently with fate. He could
respond to so much, and he would inevitably, sooner or later, demand so
much response! He was governed by a preposterously exacting temperament,
and he wore his nerves outside. And what vision he had! How he explored
the world he lived in and drew out of it all there was, all there was!
I could see him in the years to come ranging alone the fields that were
sweet and the horizons that lifted for him, and ever returning to pace
the common dusty mortal road by the side of a purblind wife. On general
principles, as a case to point at, it would be a conspicuous pity. Nor
would it lack the aspect of a particular, a personal misfortune. Dacres
was occupied in quite the natural normal degree with his charming self;
he would pass his misery on, and who would deserve to escape it less
than his mother-in-law?

I listened to Emily Morgan, who gleaned in the ship more information
about Dacres Tottenham's people, pay, and prospects than I had ever
acquired, and I kept an eye upon the pair which was, I flattered myself,
quite maternal. I watched them without acute anxiety, deploring the
threatening destiny, but hardly nearer to it than one is in the stalls
to the stage. My moments of real concern for Dacres were mingled more
with anger than with sorrow--it seemed inexcusable that he, with his
infallible divining-rod for temperament, should be on the point of
making such an ass of himself. Though I talk of the stage there was
nothing at all dramatic to reward my attention, mine and Emily Morgan's.
To my imagination, excited by its idea of what Dacres Tottenham's
courtship ought to be, the attentions he paid to Cecily were most
humdrum. He threw rings into buckets with her--she was good at that--and
quoits upon the 'bull' board; he found her chair after the decks were
swabbed in the morning and established her in it; he paced the deck with
her at convenient times and seasons. They were humdrum, but they were
constant and cumulative. Cecily took them with an even breath that
perfectly matched. There was hardly anything, on her part, to note--a
little discreet observation of his comings and goings, eyes scarcely
lifted from her book, and later just a hint of proprietorship, as the
evening she came up to me on deck, our first night in the Indian
Ocean. I was lying in my long chair looking at the thick, low stars and
thinking it was a long time since I had seen John.

'Dearest mamma, out here and nothing over your shoulders! You ARE
imprudent. Where is your wrap? Mr. Tottenham, will you please fetch
mamma's wrap for her?'

'If mamma so instructs me,' he said audaciously.

'Do as Cecily tells you,' I laughed, and he went and did it, while I by
the light of a quartermaster's lantern distinctly saw my daughter blush.

Another time, when Cecily came down to undress, she bent over me as I
lay in the lower berth with unusual solicitude. I had been dozing, and I
jumped.

'What is it, child?' I said. 'Is the ship on fire?'

'No, mamma, the ship is not on fire. There is nothing wrong. I'm so
sorry I startled you. But Mr. Tottenham has been telling me all about
what you did for the soldiers the time plague broke out in the lines at
Mian-Mir. I think it was splendid, mamma, and so does he.'

'Oh, Lord!' I groaned. 'Good night.'

Chapter 1.IV.

It remained in my mind, that little thing that Dacres had taken the
trouble to tell my daughter; I thought about it a good deal. It seemed
to me the most serious and convincing circumstances that had yet offered
itself to my consideration. Dacres was no longer content to bring solace
and support to the more appealing figure of the situation; he must set
to work, bless him! to improve the situation itself. He must try to
induce Miss Farnham, by telling her everything he could remember to
my credit, to think as well of her mother as possible, in spite of the
strange and secret blows which that mother might be supposed to sit
up at night to deliver to her. Cecily thought very well of me already;
indeed, with private reservations as to my manners and--no, NOT my
morals, I believe I exceeded her expectations of what a perfectly new
and untrained mother would be likely to prove. It was my theory that she
found me all she could understand me to be. The maternal virtues of the
outside were certainly mine; I put them on with care every morning and
wore them with patience all day. Dacres, I assured myself, must have
allowed his preconception to lead him absurdly by the nose not to see
that the girl was satisfied, that my impatience, my impotence, did
not at all make her miserable. Evidently, however, he had created
our relations differently; evidently he had set himself to their
amelioration. There was portent in it; things seemed to be closing in. I
bit off a quarter of an inch of wooden pen-handle in considering whether
or not I should mention it in my letter to John, and decided that it
would be better just perhaps to drop a hint. Though I could not expect
John to receive it with any sort of perturbation. Men are different; he
would probably think Tottenham well enough able to look after himself.

I had embarked on my letter, there at the end of a corner-table of the
saloon, when I saw Dacres saunter through. He wore a very conscious
and elaborately purposeless air; and it jumped with my mood that he had
nothing less than the crisis of his life in his pocket, and was looking
for me. As he advanced towards me between the long tables doubt left me
and alarm assailed me. 'I'm glad to find you in a quiet corner,' said
he, seating himself, and confirmed my worst anticipations.

'I'm writing to John,' I said, and again applied myself to my
pen-handle. It is a trick Cecily has since done her best in vain to cure
me of.

'I am going to interrupt you,' he said. 'I have not had an opportunity
of talking to you for some time.'

'I like that!' I exclaimed derisively.

'And I want to tell you that I am very much charmed with Cecily.'

'Well,' I said, 'I am not going to gratify you by saying anything
against her.'

'You don't deserve her, you know.'

'I won't dispute that. But, if you don't mind--I'm not sure that I'll
stand being abused, dear boy.'

'I quite see it isn't any use. Though one spoke with the tongues of men
and of angels--'

'And had not charity,' I continued for him. 'Precisely. I won't go on,
but your quotation is very apt.'

'I so bow down before her simplicity. It makes a wide and beautiful
margin for the rest of her character. She is a girl Ruskin would have
loved.'

'I wonder,' said I. 'He did seem fond of the simple type, didn't he?'

'Her mind is so clear, so transparent. The motive spring of everything
she says and does is so direct. Don't you find you can most completely
depend upon her?'

'Oh yes,' I said; 'certainly. I nearly always know what she is going
to say before she says it, and under given circumstances I can tell
precisely what she will do.'

'I fancy her sense of duty is very beautifully developed.'

'It is,' I said. 'There is hardly a day when I do not come in contact
with it.'

'Well, that is surely a good thing. And I find that calm poise of hers
very restful.'

'I would not have believed that so many virtues could reside in one
young lady,' I said, taking refuge in flippancy, 'and to think that she
should be my daughter!'

'As I believe you know, that seems to me rather a cruel stroke of
destiny, Mrs. Farnham.'

'Oh yes, I know! You have a constructive imagination, Dacres. You
don't seem to see that the girl is protected by her limitations, like a
tortoise. She lives within them quite secure and happy and content. How
determined you are to be sorry for her!'

Mr. Tottenham looked at the end of this lively exchange as though he
sought for a polite way of conveying to me that I rather was the limited
person. He looked as if he wished he could say things. The first of them
would be, I saw, that he had quite a different conception of Cecily,
that it was illuminated by many trifles, nuances of feeling and
expression, which he had noticed in his talks with her whenever they had
skirted the subject of her adoption by her mother. He knew her, he was
longing to say, better than I did; when it would have been natural to
reply that one could not hope to compete in such a direction with an
intelligent young man, and we should at once have been upon delicate and
difficult ground. So it was as well perhaps that he kept silence until
he said, as he had come prepared to say, 'Well, I want to put that
beyond a doubt--her happiness--if I'm good enough. I want her, please,
and I only hope that she will be half as willing to come as you are
likely to be to let her go.'

It was a shock when it came, plump, like that; and I was horrified to
feel how completely every other consideration was lost for the instant
in the immense relief that it prefigured. To be my whole complete self
again, without the feeling that a fraction of me was masquerading about
in Cecily! To be freed at once, or almost, from an exacting condition
and an impossible ideal! 'Oh!' I exclaimed, and my eyes positively
filled. 'You ARE good, Dacres, but I couldn't let you do that.'

His undisguised stare brought me back to a sense of the proportion of
things. I saw that in the combination of influences that had brought Mr.
Tottenham to the point of proposing to marry my daughter consideration
for me, if it had a place, would be fantastic. Inwardly I laughed at the
egotism of raw nerves that had conjured it up, even for an instant, as
a reason for gratitude. The situation was not so peculiar, not so
interesting, as that. But I answered his stare with a smile; what I had
said might very well stand.

'Do you imagine,' he said, seeing that I did not mean to amplify it,
'that I want to marry her out of any sort of GOODness?'

'Benevolence is your weakness, Dacres.'

'I see. You think one's motive is to withdraw her from a relation
which ought to be the most natural in the world, but which is, in her
particular and painful case, the most equivocal.'

'Well, come,' I remonstrated. 'You have dropped one or two things, you
know, in the heat of your indignation, not badly calculated to give one
that idea. The eloquent statement you have just made, for instance--it
carries all the patness of old conviction. How often have you rehearsed
it?'

I am a fairly long-suffering person, but I began to feel a little
annoyed with my would-be son-in-law. If the relation were achieved it
would give him no prescriptive right to bully me; and we were still in
very early anticipation of that.

'Ah!' he said disarmingly. 'Don't let us quarrel. I'm sorry you think
that; because it isn't likely to bring your favour to my project, and
I want you friendly and helpful. Oh, confound it!' he exclaimed, with
sudden temper. 'You ought to be. I don't understand this aloofness.
I half suspect it's pose. You undervalue Cecily--well, you have no
business to undervalue me. You know me better than anybody in the world.
Now are you going to help me to marry your daughter?'

'I don't think so,' I said slowly, after a moment's silence, which he
sat through like a mutinous schoolboy. 'I might tell you that I don't
care a button whom you marry, but that would not be true. I do care more
or less. As you say, I know you pretty well. I'd a little rather you
didn't make a mess of it; and if you must I should distinctly prefer
not to have the spectacle under my nose for the rest of my life. I can't
hinder you, but I won't help you.'

'And what possesses you to imagine that in marrying Cecily I should make
a mess of it? Shouldn't your first consideration be whether SHE would?'

'Perhaps it should, but, you see, it isn't. Cecily would be happy with
anybody who made her comfortable. You would ask a good deal more than
that, you know.'

Dacres, at this, took me up promptly. Life, he said, the heart of life,
had particularly little to say to temperament. By the heart of life I
suppose he meant married love. He explained that its roots asked other
sustenance, and that it throve best of all on simple elemental goodness.
So long as a man sought in women mere casual companionship, perhaps
the most exquisite thing to be experienced was the stimulus of some
spiritual feminine counterpart; but when he desired of one woman that
she should be always and intimately with him, the background of his
life, the mother of his children, he was better advised to avoid
nerves and sensibilities, and try for the repose of the common--the
uncommon--domestic virtues. Ah, he said, they were sweet, like lavender.
(Already, I told him, he smelled the housekeeper's linen-chest.) But
I did not interrupt him much; I couldn't, he was too absorbed. To
temperamental pairing, he declared, the century owed its breed of
decadents. I asked him if he had ever really recognized one; and he
retorted that if he hadn't he didn't wish to make a beginning in his
own family. In a quarter of an hour he repudiated the theories of a
lifetime, a gratifying triumph for simple elemental goodness. Having
denied the value of the subtler pretensions to charm in woman as you
marry her, he went artlessly on to endow Cecily with as many of them as
could possibly be desirable. He actually persuaded himself to say that
it was lovely to see the reflections of life in her tranquil spirit;
and when I looked at him incredulously he grew angry, and hinted that
Cecily's sensitiveness to reflections and other things might be a trifle
beyond her mother's ken. 'She responds instantly, intimately, to the
beautiful everywhere,' he declared.

'Aren't the opportunities of life on board ship rather limited to
demonstrate that?' I inquired. 'I know--you mean sunsets. Cecily is very
fond of sunsets. She is always asking me to come and look at them.'

'I was thinking of last night's sunset,' he confessed. 'We looked at it
together.'

'What did she say?' I asked idly.

'Nothing very much. That's just the point. Another girl would have raved
and gushed.'

'Oh, well, Cecily never does that,' I responded. 'Nevertheless she is
a very ordinary human instrument. I hope I shall have no temptation ten
years hence to remind you that I warned you of her quality.'

'I wish, not in the least for my own profit, for I am well convinced
already, but simply to win your cordiality and your approval--never did
an unexceptional wooer receive such niggard encouragement!--I wish there
were some sort of test for her quality. I would be proud to stand by it,
and you would be convinced. I can't find words to describe my objection
to your state of mind.'

The thing seemed to me to be a foregone conclusion. I saw it
accomplished, with all its possibilities of disastrous commonplace. I
saw all that I have here taken the trouble to foreshadow. So far as
I was concerned, Dacres's burden would add itself to my philosophies,
voila tout. I should always be a little uncomfortable about it, because
it had been taken from my back; but it would not be a matter for the
wringing of hands. And yet--the hatefulness of the mistake! Dacres's
bold talk of a test made no suggestion. Should my invention be more
fertile? I thought of something.

'You have said nothing to her yet?' I asked.

'Nothing. I don't think she suspects for a moment. She treats me as if
no such fell design were possible. I'm none too confident, you know,' he
added, with longer face.

'We go straight to Agra. Could you come to Agra?'

'Ideal!' he cried. 'The memory of Mumtaz! The garden of the Taj! I've
always wanted to love under the same moon as Shah Jehan. How thoughtful
of you!'

'You must spend a few days with us in Agra,' I continued. 'And as you
say, it is the very place to shrine your happiness, if it comes to pass
there.'

'Well, I am glad to have extracted a word of kindness from you at last,'
said Dacres, as the stewards came to lay the table. 'But I wish,' he
added regretfully, 'you could have thought of a test.'

Chapter 1.V.

Four days later we were in Agra. A time there was when the name would
have been the key of dreams to me; now it stood for John's headquarters.
I was rejoiced to think I would look again upon the Taj; and the
prospect of living with it was a real enchantment; but I pondered most
the kind of house that would be provided for the General Commanding the
District, how many the dining-room would seat, and whether it would
have a roof of thatch or of corrugated iron--I prayed against corrugated
iron. I confess these my preoccupations. I was forty, and at forty the
practical considerations of life hold their own even against domes of
marble, world-renowned, and set about with gardens where the bulbul
sings to the rose. I smiled across the years at the raptures of my first
vision of the place at twenty-one, just Cecily's age. Would I now sit
under Arjamand's cypresses till two o'clock in the morning to see the
wonder of her tomb at a particular angle of the moon? Would I climb one
of her tall white ministering minarets to see anything whatever? I very
greatly feared that I would not. Alas for the aging of sentiment, of
interest! Keep your touch with life and your seat in the saddle as
long as you will, the world is no new toy at forty. But Cecily was
twenty-one, Cecily who sat stolidly finishing her lunch while Dacres
Tottenham talked about Akbar and his philosophy. 'The sort of man,' he
said, 'that Carlyle might have smoked a pipe with.'

'But surely,' said Cecily reflectively, 'tobacco was not discovered in
England then. Akbar came to the throne in 1526.'

'Nor Carlyle either for that matter,' I hastened to observe.
'Nevertheless, I think Mr. Tottenham's proposition must stand.'

'Thanks, Mrs. Farnham,' said Dacres. 'But imagine Miss Farnham's
remembering Akbar's date! I'm sure you didn't!'

'Let us hope she doesn't know too much about him,' I cried gaily, 'or
there will be nothing to tell!'

'Oh, really and truly very little!' said Cecily, 'but as soon as we
heard papa would be stationed here Aunt Emma made me read up about those
old Moguls and people. I think I remember the dynasty. Baber, wasn't he
the first? And then Humayon, and after him Akbar, and then Jehangir, and
then Shah Jehan. But I've forgotten every date but Akbar's.'

She smiled her smile of brilliant health and even spirits as she made
the damaging admission, and she was so good to look at, sitting there
simple and wholesome and fresh, peeling her banana with her well-shaped
fingers, that we swallowed the dynasty as it were whole, and smiled back
upon her. John, I may say, was extremely pleased with Cecily; he
said she was a very satisfactory human accomplishment. One would
have thought, positively, the way he plumed himself over his handsome
daughter, that he alone was responsible for her. But John, having
received his family, straightway set off with his Staff on a tour of
inspection, and thereby takes himself out of this history. I sometimes
think that if he had stayed--but there has never been the lightest
recrimination between us about it, and I am not going to hint one now.

'Did you read,' asked Dacres, 'what he and the Court poet wrote over the
entrance gate to the big mosque at Fattehpur-Sikri? It's rather nice.
"The world is a looking-glass, wherein the image has come and is
gone--take as thine own nothing more than what thou lookest upon."'

My daughter's thoughtful gaze was, of course, fixed upon the speaker,
and in his own glance I saw a sudden ray of consciousness; but Cecily
transferred her eyes to the opposite wall, deeply considering, and while
Dacres and I smiled across the table, I saw that she had perceived no
reason for blushing. It was a singularly narrow escape.

'No,' she said, 'I didn't; what a curious proverb for an emperor to
make! He couldn't possibly have been able to see all his possessions at
once.'

'If you have finished,' Dacres addressed her, 'do let me show you what
your plain and immediate duty is to the garden. The garden waits for
you--all the roses expectant--'

'Why, there isn't one!' cried Cecily, pinning on her hat. It was
pleasing, and just a trifle pathetic, the way he hurried her out of the
scope of any little dart; he would not have her even within range of
amused observation. Would he continue, I wondered vaguely, as, with my
elbows on the table, I tore into strips the lemon-leaf that floated in
my finger-bowl--would he continue, through life, to shelter her from his
other clever friends as now he attempted to shelter her from her mother?
In that case he would have to domicile her, poor dear, behind the
curtain, like the native ladies--a good price to pay for a protection
of which, bless her heart! she would be all unaware. I had quite stopped
bemoaning the affair; perhaps the comments of my husband, who treated
it with broad approval and satisfaction, did something to soothe my
sensibilities. At all events, I had gradually come to occupy a high
fatalistic ground towards the pair. If it was written upon their
foreheads that they should marry, the inscription was none of mine;
and, of course, it was true, as John had indignantly stated, that
Dacres might do very much worse. One's interest in Dacres Tottenham's
problematical future had in no way diminished; but the young man was so
positive, so full of intention, so disinclined to discussion--he had
not reopened the subject since that morning in the saloon of the
Caledonia--that one's feeling about it rather took the attenuated form
of a shrug. I am afraid, too, that the pleasurable excitement of such
an impending event had a little supervened; even at forty there is no
disallowing the natural interests of one's sex. As I sat there pulling
my lemon-leaf to pieces, I should not have been surprised or in the
least put about if the two had returned radiant from the lawn to demand
my blessing. As to the test of quality that I had obligingly invented
for Dacres on the spur of the moment without his knowledge or
connivance, it had some time ago faded into what he apprehended it to
be--a mere idyllic opportunity, a charming background, a frame for his
project, of prettier sentiment than the funnels and the hand-rails of a
ship.

Mr. Tottenham had ten days to spend with us. He knew the place well;
it belonged to the province to whose service he was dedicated, and he
claimed with impressive authority the privilege of showing it to Cecily
by degrees--the Hall of Audience today, the Jessamine Tower tomorrow,
the tomb of Akbar another, and the Deserted City yet another day. We
arranged the expeditions in conference, Dacres insisting only upon the
order of them, which I saw was to be cumulative, with the Taj at the
very end, on the night precisely of the full of the moon, with a better
chance of roses. I had no special views, but Cecily contributed some;
that we should do the Hall of Audience in the morning, so as not to
interfere with the club tennis in the afternoon, that we should bicycle
to Akbar's tomb and take a cold luncheon--if we were sure there would
be no snakes--to the Deserted City, to all of which Dacres gave loyal
assent. I endorsed everything; I was the encouraging chorus, only
stipulating that my number should be swelled from day to day by the
addition of such persons as I should approve. Cecily, for instance,
wanted to invite the Bakewells because we had come out in the same ship
with them; but I could not endure the Bakewells, and it seemed to me
that our having made the voyage with them was the best possible reason
for declining to lay eyes on them for the rest of our natural lives.
'Mamma has such strong prejudices,' Cecily remarked, as she reluctantly
gave up the idea; and I waited to see whether the graceless Tottenham
would unmurmuringly take down the Bakewells. How strong must be the
sentiment that turns a man into a boa-constrictor without a pang of
transmigration! But no, this time he was faithful to the principles of
his pre-Cecilian existence. 'They are rather Boojums,' he declared.
'You would think so, too, if you knew them better. It is that kind of
excellent person that makes the real burden of India.' I could have
patted him on the back.

Thanks to the rest of the chorus, which proved abundantly available,
I was no immediate witness to Cecily's introduction to the glorious
fragments which sustain in Agra the memory of the moguls. I may as well
say that I arranged with care that if anybody must be standing by when
Dacres disclosed them, it should not be I. If Cecily had squinted,
I should have been sorry, but I would have found in it no personal
humiliation. There were other imperfections of vision, however, for
which I felt responsible and ashamed; and with Dacres, though the
situation, Heaven knows, was none of my seeking, I had a little the
feeling of a dealer who offers a defective bibelot to a connoisseur. My
charming daughter--I was fifty times congratulated upon her appearance
and her manners--had many excellent qualities and capacities which she
never inherited from me; but she could see no more than the bulk, no
further than the perspective; she could register exactly as much as a
camera.

This was a curious thing, perhaps, to displease my maternal vanity, but
it did; I had really rather she squinted; and when there was anything to
look at I kept out of the way. I can not tell precisely, therefore, what
the incidents were that contributed to make Mr. Tottenham, on our return
from these expeditions, so thoughtful, with a thoughtfulness which
increased, towards the end of them, to a positive gravity. This would
disappear during dinner under the influence of food and drink. He
would talk nightly with new enthusiasm and fresh hope--or did I imagine
it?--of the loveliness he had arranged to reveal on the following day.
If again my imagination did not lead me astray, I fancied this occurred
later and later in the course of the meal as the week went on; as if
his state required more stimulus as time progressed. One evening, when
I expected it to flag altogether, I had a whim to order champagne and
observe the effect; but I am glad to say that I reproved myself, and
refrained.

Cecily, meanwhile, was conducting herself in a manner which left nothing
to be desired. If, as I sometimes thought, she took Dacres very much for
granted, she took him calmly for granted; she seemed a prey to none of
those fluttering uncertainties, those suspended judgments and elaborate
indifferences which translate themselves so plainly in a young lady
receiving addresses. She turned herself out very freshly and very well;
she was always ready for everything, and I am sure that no glance of
Dacres Tottenham's found aught but direct and decorous response. His
society on these occasions gave her solid pleasure; so did the drive and
the lunch; the satisfactions were apparently upon the same plane. She
was aware of the plum, if I may be permitted a brusque but irresistible
simile; and with her mouth open, her eyes modestly closed, and her head
in a convenient position, she waited, placidly, until it should fall in.
The Farnham ladies would have been delighted with the result of their
labours in the sweet reason and eminent propriety of this attitude.
Thinking of my idiotic sufferings when John began to fix himself upon my
horizon, I pondered profoundly the power of nature in differentiation.

One evening, the last, I think, but one, I had occasion to go to my
daughter's room, and found her writing in her commonplace-book. She had
a commonplace-book, as well as a Where Is It? an engagement-book, an
account-book, a diary, a Daily Sunshine, and others with purposes too
various to remember. 'Dearest mamma,' she said, as I was departing,
'there is only one "p" in "opulence", isn't there?'

'Yes,' I replied, with my hand on the door-handle, and added curiously,
for it was an odd word in Cecily's mouth, 'Why?'

She hardly hesitated. 'Oh,' she said, 'I am just writing down one or two
things Mr. Tottenham said about Agra before I forget them. They seemed
so true.'

'He has a descriptive touch,' I remarked.

'I think he describes beautifully. Would you like to hear what he said
today?'

'I would,' I replied, sincerely.

'"Agra,"' read this astonishing young lady, '"is India's one pure idyll.
Elsewhere she offers other things, foolish opulence, tawdry pageant,
treachery of eunuchs and jealousies of harems, thefts of kings' jewels
and barbaric retributions; but they are all actual, visualized, or
part of a past that shows to the backward glance hardly more relief
and vitality than a Persian painting"--I should like to see a Persian
painting--"but here the immortal tombs and pleasure-houses rise out of
colour delicate and subtle; the vision holds across three hundred years;
the print of the court is still in the dust of the city."'

'Did you really let him go on like that?' I exclaimed. 'It has the
license of a lecture!'

'I encouraged him to. Of course he didn't say it straight off. He said
it naturally; he stopped now and then to cough. I didn't understand it
all; but I think I have remembered every word.'

'You have a remarkable memory. I'm glad he stopped to cough. Is there
any more?'

'One little bit. "Here the moguls wrought their passions into marble,
and held them up with great refrains from their religion, and set them
about with gardens; and here they stand in the twilight of the glory of
those kings and the noonday splendour of their own."'

'How clever of you!' I exclaimed. 'How wonderfully clever of you to
remember!'

'I had to ask him to repeat one or two sentences. He didn't like that.
But this is nothing. I used to learn pages letter-perfect for Aunt Emma.
She was very particular. I think it is worth preserving, don't you?'

'Dear Cecily,' I responded, 'you have a frugal mind.'

There was nothing else to respond. I could not tell her just how
practical I thought her, or how pathetic her little book.

Chapter 1.VI.

We drove together, after dinner, to the Taj. The moonlight lay in an
empty splendour over the broad sandy road, with the acacias pricking up
on each side of it and the gardens of the station bungalows stretching
back into clusters of crisp shadows. It was an exquisite February night,
very still. Nothing seemed abroad but two or three pariah dogs, upon
vague and errant business, and the Executive Engineer going swiftly home
from the club on his bicycle. Even the little shops of the bazaar were
dark and empty; only here and there a light showed barred behind
the carved balconies of the upper rooms, and there was hardly any
tom-tomming. The last long slope of the road showed us the river curving
to the left, through a silent white waste that stretched indefinitely
into the moonlight on one side, and was crowned by Akbar's fort on the
other. His long high line of turrets and battlements still guarded a
hint of their evening rose, and dim and exquisite above them hovered
the three dome-bubbles of the Pearl Mosque. It was a night of perfect
illusion, and the illusion was mysterious, delicate, and faint. I sat
silent as we rolled along, twenty years nearer to the original joy of
things when John and I drove through the same old dream.

Dacres, too, seemed preoccupied; only Cecily was, as they say, herself.
Cecily was really more than herself, she exhibited an unusual flow of
spirits. She talked continually, she pointed out this and that, she
asked who lived here and who lived there. At regular intervals of
about four minutes she demanded if it wasn't simply too lovely. She
sat straight up with her vigorous profile and her smart hat; and the
silhouette of her personality sharply refused to mingle with the dust
of any dynasty. She was a contrast, a protest; positively she was
an indignity. 'Do lean back, dear child,' I exclaimed at last. 'You
interfere with the landscape.'

She leaned back, but she went on interfering with it in terms of
sincerest enthusiasm.

When we stopped at the great archway of entrance I begged to be left in
the carriage. What else could one do, when the golden moment had come,
but sit in the carriage and measure it? They climbed the broad stone
steps together and passed under the lofty gravures into the garden, and
I waited. I waited and remembered. I am not, as perhaps by this time is
evident, a person of overwhelming sentiment, but I think the smile upon
my lips was gentle. So plainly I could see, beyond the massive
archway and across a score of years, all that they saw at that
moment--Arjamand's garden, and the long straight tank of marble cleaving
it full of sleeping water and the shadows of the marshaling cypresses;
her wide dark garden of roses and of pomegranates, and at the end the
Vision, marvellous, aerial, the soul of something--is it beauty? is it
sorrow?--that great white pride of love in mourning such as only here
in all the round of our little world lifts itself to the stars, the
unpaintable, indescribable Taj Mahal. A gentle breath stole out with a
scent of jessamine and such a memory! I closed my eyes and felt the warm
luxury of a tear.

Thinking of the two in the garden, my mood was very kind, very
conniving. How foolish after all were my cherry-stone theories of taste
and temperament before that uncalculating thing which sways a world and
builds a Taj Mahal! Was it probable that Arjamand and her Emperor had
loved fastidiously, and yet how they had loved! I wandered away into
consideration of the blind forces which move the world, in which comely
young persons like my daughter Cecily had such a place; I speculated
vaguely upon the value of the subtler gifts of sympathy and insight
which seemed indeed, at that enveloping moment, to be mere flowers
strewn upon the tide of deeper emotions. The garden sent me a fragrance
of roses; the moon sailed higher and picked out the little kiosks set
along the wall. It was a charming, charming thing to wait, there at the
portal of the silvered, scented garden, for an idyll to come forth.

When they reappeared, Dacres and my daughter, they came with casual
steps and cheerful voices. They might have been a couple of tourists.
The moonlight fell full upon them on the platform under the arch.
It showed Dacres measuring with his stick the length of the Sanskrit
letters which declared the stately texts, and Cecily's expression of
polite, perfunctory interest. They looked up at the height above them;
they looked back at the vision behind. Then they sauntered towards
the carriage, he offering a formal hand to help her down the uncertain
steps, she gracefully accepting it.

'You--you have not been long,' said I. 'I hope you didn't hurry on my
account.'

'Miss Farnham found the marble a little cold under foot,' replied
Dacres, putting Miss Farnham in.

'You see,' explained Cecily, 'I stupidly forgot to change into thicker
soles. I have only my slippers. But, mamma, how lovely it is! Do let us
come again in the daytime. I am dying to make a sketch of it.'

Mr. Tottenham was to leave us on the following day. In the morning,
after 'little breakfast,' as we say in India, he sought me in the room I
had set aside to be particularly my own.

Again I was writing to John, but this time I waited for precisely his
interruption. I had got no further than 'My dearest husband,' and my
pen-handle was a fringe.

'Another fine day,' I said, as if the old, old Indian joke could give
him ease, poor man!

'Yes,' said he, 'we are having lovely weather.'

He had forgotten that it was a joke. Then he lapsed into silence while I
renewed my attentions to my pen.

'I say,' he said at last, with so strained a look about his mouth that
it was almost a contortion, 'I haven't done it, you know.'

'No,' I responded, cheerfully, 'and you're not going to. Is that it?
Well!'

'Frankly--' said he.

'Dear me, yes! Anything else between you and me would be grotesque,' I
interrupted, 'after all these years.'

'I don't think it would be a success,' he said, looking at me resolutely
with his clear blue eyes, in which still lay, alas! the possibility of
many delusions.

'No,' I said, 'I never did, you know. But the prospect had begun to
impose upon me.'

'To say how right you were would seem, under the circumstances, the most
hateful form of flattery.'

'Yes,' I said, 'I think I can dispense with your verbal endorsement.'
I felt a little bitter. It was, of course, better that the connoisseur
should have discovered the flaw before concluding the transaction; but
although I had pointed it out myself I was not entirely pleased to have
the article returned.

'I am infinitely ashamed that it should have taken me all these
days--day after day and each contributory--to discover what you saw so
easily and so completely.'

'You forget that I am her mother,' I could not resist the temptation of
saying.

'Oh, for God's sake don't jeer! Please be absolutely direct, and tell
me if you have reason to believe that to the extent of a thought, of a
breath--to any extent at all--she cares.'

He was, I could see, very deeply moved; he had not arrived at this point
without trouble and disorder not lightly to be put on or off. Yet I did
not hurry to his relief, I was still possessed by a vague feeling of
offense. I reflected that any mother would be, and I quite plumed myself
upon my annoyance. It was so satisfactory, when one had a daughter, to
know the sensations of even any mother. Nor was it soothing to remember
that the young man's whole attitude towards Cecily had been based upon
criticism of me, even though he sat before me whipped with his own
lash. His temerity had been stupid and obstinate; I could not regret his
punishment.

I kept him waiting long enough to think all this, and then I replied, 'I
have not the least means of knowing.'

I can not say what he expected, but he squared his shoulders as if he
had received a blow and might receive another. Then he looked at me
with a flash of the old indignation. 'You are not near enough to her for
that!' he exclaimed.

'I am not near enough to her for that.'

Silence fell between us. A crow perched upon an opened venetian and
cawed lustily. For years afterward I never heard a crow caw without a
sense of vain, distressing experiment. Dacres got up and began to walk
about the room. I very soon put a stop to that. 'I can't talk to a
pendulum,' I said, but I could not persuade him to sit down again.

'Candidly,' he said at length, 'do you think she would have me?'

'I regret to say that I think she would. But you would not dream of
asking her.'

'Why not? She is a dear girl,' he responded inconsequently.

'You could not possibly stand it.'

Then Mr. Tottenham delivered himself of this remarkable phrase: 'I could
stand it,' he said, 'as well as you can.'

There was far from being any joy in the irony with which I regarded him
and under which I saw him gather up his resolution to go; nevertheless
I did nothing to make it easy for him. I refrained from imparting
my private conviction that Cecily would accept the first presentable
substitute that appeared, although it was strong. I made no reference to
my daughter's large fund of philosophy and small balance of sentiment. I
did not even--though this was reprehensible--confess the test, the test
of quality in these ten days with the marble archives of the Moguls,
which I had almost wantonly suggested, which he had so unconsciously
accepted, so disastrously applied. I gave him quite fifteen minutes of
his bad quarter of an hour, and when it was over I wrote truthfully but
furiously to John....

That was ten years ago. We have since attained the shades of retirement,
and our daughter is still with us when she is not with Aunt Emma and
Aunt Alice--grandmamma has passed away. Mr. Tottenham's dumb departure
that day in February--it was the year John got his C.B.--was followed,
I am thankful to say, by none of the symptoms of unrequited affection on
Cecily's part. Not for ten minutes, so far as I was aware, was she the
maid forlorn. I think her self-respect was of too robust a character,
thanks to the Misses Farnham. Still less, of course, had she any
reproaches to serve upon her mother, although for a long time I thought
I detected--or was it my guilty conscience?--a spark of shrewdness in
the glance she bent upon me when the talk was of Mr. Tottenham and
the probabilities of his return to Agra. So well did she sustain her
experience, or so little did she feel it, that I believe the impression
went abroad that Dacres had been sent disconsolate away. One astonishing
conversation I had with her some six months later, which turned upon
the point of a particularly desirable offer. She told me something then,
without any sort of embarrassment, but quite lucidly and directly, that
edified me much to hear. She said that while she was quite sure that Mr.
Tottenham thought of her only as a friend--she had never had the least
reason for any other impression--he had done her a service for which she
could not thank him enough--in showing her what a husband might be. He
had given her a standard; it might be high, but it was unalterable.
She didn't know whether she could describe it, but Mr. Tottenham was
different from the kind of man you seemed to meet in India. He had his
own ways of looking at things, and he talked so well. He had given her
an ideal, and she intended to profit by it. To know that men like Mr.
Tottenham existed, and to marry any other kind would be an act of folly
which she did not intend to commit. No, Major the Hon. Hugh Taverel did
not come near it--very far short, indeed! He had talked to her during
the whole of dinner the night before about jackal-hunting with a bobbery
pack--not at all an elevated mind. Yes, he might be a very good
fellow, but as a companion for life she was sure he would not be at all
suitable. She would wait.

And she has waited. I never thought she would, but she has. From time
to time men have wished to take her from us, but the standard has been
inexorable, and none of them have reached it. When Dacres married the
charming American whom he caught like a butterfly upon her Eastern tour,
Cecily sent them as a wedding present an alabaster model of the Taj, and
I let her do it--the gift was so exquisitely appropriate. I suppose
he never looks at it without being reminded that he didn't marry Miss
Farnham, and I hope that he remembers that he owes it to Miss Farnham's
mother. So much I think I might claim; it is really very little
considering what it stands for. Cecily is permanently with us--I believe
she considers herself an intimate. I am very reasonable about lending
her to her aunts, but she takes no sort of advantage of my liberality;
she says she knows her duty is at home. She is growing into a firm and
solid English maiden lady, with a good colour and great decision of
character. That she always had.

I point out to John, when she takes our crumpets away from us, that she
gets it from him. I could never take away anybody's crumpets, merely
because they were indigestible, least of all my own parents'. She
has acquired a distinct affection for us, by some means best known
to herself; but I should have no objection to that if she would not
rearrange my bonnet-strings. That is a fond liberty to which I take
exception; but it is one thing to take exception and another to express
it.

Our daughter is with us, permanently with us. She declares that she
intends to be the prop of our declining years; she makes the statement
often, and always as if it were humorous. Nevertheless I sometimes
notice a spirit of inquiry, a note of investigation in her encounters
with the opposite sex that suggests an expectation not yet extinct
that another and perhaps a more appreciative Dacres Tottenham may flash
across her field of vision--alas, how improbable! Myself I can not
imagine why she should wish it; I have grown in my old age into a
perfect horror of cultivated young men; but if such a person should by
a miracle at any time appear, I think it is extremely improbable that I
will interfere on his behalf.

2. An Impossible Ideal.

Chapter 2.I.

To understand how we prized him, Dora Harris and I, it is necessary to
know Simla. I suppose people think of that place, if they ever do think
of it, as an agreeable retreat in the wilds of the Himalayas where
deodars and scandals grow, and where the Viceroy if he likes may take
off his decorations and go about in flannels. I know how useless it
would be to try to give a more faithful impression, and I will hold back
from the attempt as far as I can. Besides, my little story is itself
an explanation of Simla. Ingersoll Armour might have appeared almost
anywhere else without making social history. He came and bloomed among
us in the wilderness, and such and such things happened. It sounds too
rude a generalization to say that Simla is a wilderness; I hasten to
add that it is a waste as highly cultivated as you like, producing many
things more admirable than Ingersoll Armour. Still he bloomed there
conspicuously alone. Perhaps there would have been nothing to tell if we
had not tried to gather him. That was wrong; Nature in Simla expects you
to be content with cocked hats.

There are artists almost everywhere and people who paint even in the
Himalayas, though Miss Harris and I in our superior way went yearly to
the Simla Fine Arts Exhibition chiefly to amuse ourselves by scoffing.
It was easy to say clever things about the poor little exhibits; and one
was grateful to the show on this account, for nothing is more depressing
east of Suez than the absence of provocation to say clever things. There
one afternoon in May as we marched about enjoying ourselves, we came
upon Ingersoll Armour, not in the flesh, but in half a dozen studies
hanging in the least conspicuous corner and quite the worst light in the
room.

'Eh, what?' said I, and Dora exclaimed:

'I SAY!'

'Sent out from home,' I said, ever the oracle.

'Not at all,' replied Dora. 'Look, they are Indian subjects. SIMLA
subjects,' she went on, with excitement.

I turned up the catalogue. 'Ninety-seven, "Kasumti Bazaar";
ninety-eight, "Clouds on the Chor"; ninety-nine, "The House of a
Friend"--Lord, what apricot blossoms! Yes, they're all Simla.'

'For goodness' sake,' said Dora, 'who painted them? You've got the
catalogue!'

'"I. Armour,"' I read.

'"I. Armour,"' she repeated, and we looked at each other, saying in
plain silence that to the small world of Simla I. Armour was unknown.

'Not on Government House list, I venture to believe,' said Dora. That
in itself may show to what depths we sink. Yet it was a trenchant and a
reasonable speculation.

'It may be a newcomer,' I suggested, but she shook her head. 'All
newcomers call upon us,' she said. 'There in the middle of the Mall we
escape none of them. He isn't a calling person.'

'Why do you say "he"? You are very confident with your pronouns. There's
a delicacy of feeling--'

'Which exactly does not suggest a women. We are undermined by delicacy
of feeling; we're not strong enough to express it with brushes. A man
can make it a quality, a decorative characteristic, and so we see it.
With a woman it's everything--all over the place--and of no effect. Oh,
I assure you, I. Armour is a man.'

'Who shall stand against you! Let him be a man. He has taste.'

'Taste!' exclaimed Miss Harris, violently, and from the corners of her
mouth I gathered that I had said one of those things which she would
store up and produce to prove that I was not, for all my pretensions, a
person of the truest feeling. 'He sees things.'

'There's an intensity,' I ventured.

'That's better. Yes, an intensity. A perfect passion of colour. Look at
that.' She indicated a patch of hillsides perhaps six inches by four, in
which the light seemed to come and go as it does in a sapphire.

We stood and gazed. It was a tremendous thing; only half a dozen studies
with feeling and knowledge in them, but there in that remote fastness
thrice barred against the arts a tremendous thing, a banquet for our
famished eyes. What they would have said to us in London is a different
matter, and how good they really were I do not find the courage to
pronounce, but they had merit enough to prick our sense of beauty
delightfully where we found them--oh, they were good!

'Heaven send it isn't a Tommy,' said Dora, with a falling countenance.
'There is something absolutely inaccessible about a Tommy.'

'How could it be?' I asked.

'Oh, there are some inspired ones. But it isn't--that's French
technique. It's an Englishman or an American who has worked in Paris.
What in the name of fortune is he doing here?'

'Oh,' I said, 'we have had them, you know. Val Prinsep came out at the
time of the Prince of Wales's visit.'

'Do you remember that?'

'It's a matter of history,' I said, evasively, 'and Edwin Weeks
travelled through India not so many years ago. I saw his studio in Paris
afterward. Between his own canvases and Ahmedabad balconies and Delhi
embroideries and Burmese Buddhas and other things he seemed to have
carried off the whole place.'

'But they don't come up here ever. They come in the cold weather, and
as they can get plenty of snow and ice at home, they stay down in the
plains with the palm-trees.'

'Precisely; they do,' I said.

'And besides,' Dora went on, with increasing excitement, 'this isn't
a master. You see, he doesn't send a single picture--only these tiny
things. And there's a certain tentativeness'--Miss Harris, her parasol
handle pressed against her lips, looked at me with an eagerness that was
a pleasure to look at in itself.

'A certain weakness, almost a lack of confidence, in the drawing,' I
said.

'What does that signify?'

'Why, immaturity, of course--not enough discipline.'

'He's a student. Not that it amounts to a defect, you know'--she was as
jealous already as if she possessed the things--'only a sign to read
by. I should be grateful for more signs. Why should a student come to
Simla?'

'To teach, perhaps,' I suggested. Naturally one sought only among
reasons of utility.

'It's the Kensington person who teaches. When they have worked in the
ateliers and learned as much as this they never do. They paint fans and
menu cards, and starve, but they don't teach.'

Sir William Lamb, Member of Council for the Department of Finance,
was borne by the stream to our sides. The simile will hardly stand
conscientious examination, for the stream was a thin one and did no more
than trickle past, while Sir William weighed fifteen stone, and was
so eminent that it could never inconvenience him at its deepest. Dora
detached her gaze from the pictures and turned her back upon them; I
saw the measure of precaution. It was unavailing, however. 'What have
we here?' said Sir William. Dora removed her person from his line of
vision, and he saw what we had there.

'The work of a friend of yours?' Sir William was spoken of as
a 'cautious' man. He had risen to his present distinction on
stepping-stones of mistakes he conspicuously had not made.

'No,' said Dora, 'we were wondering who the artist could be.'

Sir William looked at the studies, and had a happy thought. 'If you ask
me, I should say a child of ten,' he said. He was also known as a man of
humour.

'Miss Harris had just remarked a certain immaturity,' I ventured.

'Oh, well,' said Sir William, 'this isn't the Royal Academy, is it? I
always say it's very good of people to send their things here at all.
And some of them are not half bad--I should call this year's average
very high indeed.'

'Are you pleased with the picture that has taken your prize, Sir
William?' asked Dora.

'I have bought it.' Sir William's chest underwent before our eyes an
expansion of conscious virtue. Living is so expensive in Simla; the
purchase of a merely decorative object takes almost the proportion of an
act of religion, even by a Member of Council drawing four hundred pounds
a month.

'First-rate it is, first-rate. Have you seen it? "Our Camp in Tirah."
Natives cooking in the foreground, fellows standing about smoking, and
a whole pile of tinned stores dumped down in one corner, exactly as they
would be, don't you know! Oh, I think the Committee made a very good
choice indeed, a very good choice.'

Sir William moved on, and Dora was free to send me an expressive glance.
'Isn't that just LIKE this place?' she demanded. 'Let me see, the
Viceroy's medal, the Society's silver medal, five prizes from Members
of Council. Highly Commended's as thick as blackberries, and these
perfectly fresh, original, admirable things completely ignored. What an
absurd, impossible corner of the earth it is!'

'You look very cross, you two,' said Mrs. Sinclair, trailing past. 'Come
and see the crazy china exhibit, all made of little bits, you know. They
say the photograph frames are simply lovely.'

Mrs. Sinclair's invitation was not sincere. Miss Harris was able to
answer it with a laugh and a wave. We remained beside the serious fact
of exhibits 97-103.

'Who are the judges this year?' I asked, not that I did not know
precisely who they were likely to be. There is a custom in these
matters, and I had been part of Simla for eleven years.

Dora took the catalogue from my hand and turned its pages over.

'Mr. Cathcart, of course; the Private Secretary to the Viceroy would be
on the Committee almost ex officio, wouldn't he? Impossible to conceive
a Private Secretary to the Viceroy whose opinion would not be valuable
upon any head. The member for Public Works--I suppose he can build
bridges, or could once, therefore he can draw, or could once; besides,
look at his precedence and his pay! General Haycock--isn't he head of
the Ordnance Department? I can't think of any other reason for putting
him on. Oh yes--he's a K.C.B., and he is inventing a way of taking
coloured photographs. Mr. Tilley, the old gentleman that teaches
elementary drawing to the little girls in the diocesan school, that's
all right. And Mr. Jay, of course, because Mr. Jay's water-colours
are the mainstay of the exhibition, and he must be given a chance of
expressing his opinion of them.' She handed me back the catalogue. 'I
have never been really angry with them before,' she said.

'Are you really angry now?' I asked.

'Furious,' Dora replied, and indeed her face expressed indignation. Its
lines were quite tense, and a spark shone oddly in the middle of the
eyes. One could not credit her with beauty, but as her lady friends were
fond of saying, there was something 'more' in her face. I saw a good
deal more at this moment, and it gave me pleasure, as all her feelings
did when they came out like that. I hasten to add that she was not
unpleasing; her features had a symmetry and a mobility, and her eyes
could take any transient charm they chose to endow themselves with;
though there were moments when she compared very badly with the
other young ladies of Simla with their high spirits and their pretty
complexions, very badly indeed. Those were occasions when the gay
monotony of the place pressed, I imagine, a little heavily upon her, and
the dullness she felt translated itself in her expression. But she was
by no means unpleasing.

'I must go and see Lady Pilkey's picture,' I said.

'What is the use?' said Dora. 'It's a landscape in oils--a view of the
Himalayas, near Narkanda. There are the snows in the background, very
thin and visionary through a gap in the trees, and two hills, one hill
on each side. Dark green trees, pine-trees, with a dead one in the
left foreground covered with a brilliant red creeper. Right foreground
occupied by a mountain path and a solitary native figure with its back
turned. Society's silver medal.'

'When did you see it?' I asked.

'I haven't seen it--this year. But I saw the one she sent last, and the
one the year before that. You can trust my memory, really.'

'No,' I said, 'I can't. I'm dining there tonight. I must have an
original impression.'

'Congratulate her on the warm blaze of colour in the foreground. It's
perfectly safe,' urged Miss Harris, but I felt compelled to go myself to
see lady Pilkey's landscape. When I returned I found her still sitting
in grave absorption before the studies that had taken us so by surprise.
Her face was full of a soft new light; I had never before seen the
spring touched in her that could flood it like that.

'You were very nearly right,' I announced; 'but the blaze of colour was
in the middle distance, and there was a torrent in the foreground that
quite put it out. And the picture does take the Society's silver medal.'

'I can not decide,' she replied without looking at me, 'between the
Kattiawar fair thing and those hills in the rain. I can only have
one--father won't hear of more than one.'

'You can have two,' I said bluntly, so deeply interested I was in the
effect the things had on her. 'And I will have a third for myself. I
can't withstand those apricot-trees.'

I thought there was moisture in the eyes she turned upon me, an unusual
thing--a most unusual thing--in Dora Harris; but she winked it back, if
it was there, too quickly for any certainty.

'You are a dear,' she said. Once or twice before she had called me
a dear. It reminded me, as nothing else ever did, that I was a
contemporary of her father's. It is a feeble confession, but I have
known myself refrain from doing occasional agreeable things apprehending
that she might call me a dear.

Chapter 2.II.

Dora had been out three seasons when these things happened. I remember
sharing Edward Harris's anxiety in no slight degree as to how the
situation would resolve itself when she came, the situation consisting
so considerably in his eyes of the second Mrs. Harris, who had
complicated it further with three little red-cheeked boys, all of the
age to be led about the station on very small ponies, and not under any
circumstances to be allowed in the drawing-room when one went to tea
with their mother. No one, except perhaps poor Ted himself, was more
interested than I to observe how the situation did resolve itself, in
the decision of Mrs. Harris that the boys, the two eldest at least, must
positively begin the race for the competitive examinations of the future
without further delay, and that she must as positively be domiciled in
England 'to be near' them, at all events until they had well made the
start. I should have been glad to see them ride their ponies up and down
the Mall a bit longer, poor little chaps; they were still very cherubic
to be invited to take a view of competitive examinations, however
distant; but Mrs. Harris's conviction was not to be overcome. So they
went home to begin, and she went with them, leaving Dora in possession
of her father, her father's house, his pay, his precedence, and all
that was his. Not that I would suggest any friction; I am convinced that
there was nothing like that--at least, nothing that met the eye, or the
ear. Dora adored the three little boys and was extremely kind to their
mother. She regarded this lady, I have reason to believe, with
the greatest indulgence, and behaved towards her with the greatest
consideration; I mean she had unerring intuitions as to just when,
on afternoons when Mrs. Harris was at home from dusk till dinner, she
should be dying for a walk. One could imagine her looking with her grey
eyes at dear mamma's horizon and deciding that papa was certainly not
enough to fill it by himself, deciding at the same time that he was
never likely to be ousted there, only accompanied, in a less important
and entirely innocent degree. It may be surprising that any one should
fly from so broad-minded a step-daughter; but the happy family party
lasted a bare three months. I think Mrs. Harris had a perception--she
was the kind of woman who arrived obscurely at very correct
conclusions--that she was contributing to her step-daughter's amusement
in a manner which her most benevolent intentions had not contemplated,
and she was not by any means the little person to go on doing that
indefinitely, perhaps increasingly. Besides, it was in the natural order
of things that Dora should marry, and Mrs. Harris doubtless foresaw a
comfortable return for herself in the course of a year or two, when the
usual promising junior in 'the Department' should gild his own
prospects and promote the general well-being by acquiring its head for a
father-in-law. Things always worked out if you gave them time. How much
time you ought to give them was doubtless by now a pretty constant
query with the little lady in her foggy exile; for two years had already
passed and Dora had found no connection with any young man of the
Department more permanent than those prescribed at dinners and at
dances. It is doubtful, indeed, if she had had the opportunity. There
was no absolute means of knowing; but if offers were made they never
transpired, and Mrs. Harris, far away in England, nourished a certainty
that they never were made. Speaking with her intimate knowledge of the
sex she declared that Dora frightened the men, that her cleverness was
of a kind to paralyze any sentiment of the sort that might be expected.
It depended upon Mrs. Harris's humour whether this was Dora's misfortune
or her crime. She, Dora, never frightened me, and by the time her
cleverness dawned upon me, my sentiment about her had become too robust
to be paralyzed. On the contrary, the agreeable stimulus it gave me
was one of the things I counted most valuable in my life out there. It
hardly mattered, however, that I should confess this; I was not a young
man in Harris's department. I had a department of my own; and Dora,
though she frisked with me gloriously and bullied continually, must ever
have been aware of the formidable fact that I joined the Service two
years before Edward Harris did. The daughter of three generations of
bureaucrats was not likely to forget that at one time her father had
been junior to me in the same office, though in the course of time and
the march of opportunity he had his own show now, and we nodded to
each other on the Mall with an equal sense of the divine right of
secretaries. It may seem irrelevant, but I feel compelled to explain
here that I had remained a bachelor while Harris had married twice, and
that I had kept up my cricket, while Harris had let his figure take all
the soft curves of middle age. Nevertheless the fact remained. Sometimes
I fancied it gave a certain piquancy to my relations with his daughter,
but I could never believe that the laugh was on my side.

If we met at dinner-parties, it would be sometimes Edward Harris and
sometimes myself who would take the dullest and stoutest woman down. If
she fell to him, the next in precedence was bestowed upon me, and there
might not be a pin to choose between them for phlegm and inflation. It
is a preposterous mistake to suppose that the married ladies of Simla
are in the majority brilliant and fascinating creatures, who say things
in French for greater convenience, and lead a man on. After fifteen
years I am ready to swear that I have been led on to nothing more
compromising than a subscription to the Young Women's Christian
Association, though no one could have been more docile or more
intelligent. During one viceroyalty of happy memory half a dozen
clever and amusing men and women came together in Simla--it was a mere
fortuitous occurrence, aided by a joyous ruler who hated being bored
as none before or ever since have hated it--and the place has lived
socially upon the reputation of that meteoric term ever since. Whereas
the domestic virtues are no more deeply rooted anywhere than under the
deodars; nor could any one, I hasten to add, chronicle the fact with
more profound satisfaction than myself. A dinner-party, however, is not
a favourable setting for the domestic virtues; it does them so little
justice that one could sometimes almost wish them left at home, and I
was talking of Simla dinner-parties, where I have encountered so many.
How often have I been consulted as to the best school for boys in
England, or instructed as to how much I should let my man charge me for
shoe-blacking, or advised as to the most effectual way of preventing the
butler from stealing my cheroots, while Dora Harris, remote as a star,
talked to a cavalry subaltern about wind-galls and splints! At these
moments I felt my seniority bitterly; to give Dora to a cavalry
subaltern was such plain waste.

It was an infinite pleasure to know any one as well as I seemed to know
Dora Harris. She, I believe, held no one else upon the same terms of
intimacy, though she found women, of course, with whom she fluttered and
embraced; and while there were, naturally, men with whom I exchanged the
time o'day in terms more or less cordial, I am certain that I kept all
my closest thoughts for her. It is necessary again to know Simla to
understand how our friendship was gilded by the consideration that it
was on both sides perfectly spontaneous. Social life in the poor little
place is almost a pure farce with the number of its dictated, prompted
intimacies, not controlled by general laws of expediency as at home, but
each on its own basis of hope and expectancy, broadly and ludicrously
obvious as a case by itself. There is a conspiracy of stupidity about
it, for we are all in the same hat, every one of us; there is none so
exalted that he does not urgently want a post that somebody else can
give him. So we continue to exchange our depreciated smiles, and only
privately admit that the person who most desires to be agreeable to us
is the person whom we regard with the greatest suspicion. As between
Dora Harris and myself there could be, naturally, no ax to grind. We
amused ourselves by looking on penetratingly but tolerantly at the
grinding of other people's.

That was a very principal bond between us, that uncompromising clearness
with which we looked at the place we lived in, and on the testimony of
which we were so certain that we didn't like it. The women were nearly
all so much in heaven in Simla, the men so well satisfied to be there
too, at the top of the tree, that our dissatisfaction gave us to
one another the merit of originality, almost proved in one another a
superior mind. It was not that either of us would have preferred to
grill out our days in the plains; we always had a saving clause for the
climate, the altitude, the scenery; it was Simla intrinsic, Simla as its
other conditions made it, with which we found such liberal fault. Again
I should have to explain Simla, at the length of an essay at least, to
justify our condemnation. This difficulty confronts me everywhere.
I must ask you instead to imagine a small colony of superior--very
superior--officials, of British origin and traditions, set on the top of
a hill, years and miles away from literature, music, pictures, politics,
existing like a harem on the gossip of the Viceroy's intentions, and
depending for amusement on tennis and bumble-puppy, and then consider,
you yourself, whether you are the sort of person to be unquestionably
happy there. If you see no reason to the contrary, pray do not go on.
There were times when Dora declared that she couldn't breathe for want
of an atmosphere, and times when I looked round and groaned at the
cheerful congratulatory aridity in every man's eye--men who had done
things at Oxford in my own year, and come out like me to be mummified
into a last state like this. Thank Heaven, there was never any cheerful
congratulation in my eye; one could always put there, when the thought
inspired it, a saving spark of rank ingratitude instead.

It was as if we had the most desirable things--roses, cool airs, far
snowy ranges--to build what we like with, and we built Simla--altitude,
7,000, population 2,500, headquarters of the Government of India during
the summer months. An ark it was, of course; an ark of refuge from the
horrible heat that surged below, and I wondered as I climbed the steeps
of Summer Hill in search of I. Armour's inaccessible address, whether he
was to be the dove bearing beautiful testimony of a world coming nearer.
I rejected the simile, however, as over-sanguine; we had been too long
abandoned on our Ararat.

Chapter 2.III.

A dog of no sort of caste stood in the veranda and barked at me
offensively. I picked up a stone, and he vanished like the dog of a
dream into the house. It was such a small house that it wasn't on the
municipal map at all: it looked as if someone had built it for amusement
with anything that was lying about. Nevertheless, it had a name, it
was called Amy Villa, freshly painted in white letters on a shiny
black board, and nailed against the nearest tree in the orthodox Simla
fashion. It looked as if the owner of the place had named it as a
duty towards his tenant, the board was so new, and in that case the
reflection presented itself that the tenant might have cooperated to
call it something else. It was disconcerting somehow to find that our
dove had perched, even temporarily, in Amy Villa. Nor was it soothing
to discover that the small white object stuck in the corner of the board
was Mr. Ingersoll Armour's card.

In Simla we do not stick our cards about in that way at the mercy of the
wind and the weather; we paint our names neatly under the names of our
houses with 'I.C.S.' for Indian Civil Service, or 'P.W.D.' for Public
Works Department, or whatever designation we are entitled to immediately
after, so that there can be no mistake. This strikes newcomers sometimes
as a little professional, especially when a hand accompanies, pointing;
but it is the only possible way where there are no streets and no
numbers, but where houses are dropped about a hilltop as if they had
fallen from a pepper-pot. In sticking his card out like that Mr. Armour
seemed to imagine himself au quatrieme or au cinquieme somewhere on
the south side of the Seine; it betrayed rather a ridiculous lack of
conformity. He was high enough up, however, to give any illusion; I had
to stop to find the wind to announce myself. There was nobody else to do
it if I except the dog.

I walked into the veranda and shouted. Then I saw that one end of it was
partly glazed off, and inside sat a young man in his shirt-sleeves with
his back to the door.

In reply he called out, 'That you, Rosario?' and I stood silent, taken
somewhat aback.

There was only one Rosario in Simla, and he was a subordinate in my own
office. Again the hateful need to explain. Between subordinate clerks
and officials in Simla there is a greater gulf fixed than was ever
imagined in parable. Besides, Rosario had a plain strain of what we
call 'the country' in him, a plain strain, that is, of the colour of the
country. It was certainly the first time in my official career that I
had been mistaken for Rosario.

Armour turned round and saw me--that I was a stranger.

He got up at once. 'Oh,' he said, 'I thought it was Rosario.

'It isn't,' I replied, 'my name is Philips. May I ask whether you were
expecting Mr. Rosario? I can come again, you know.'

'Oh, it doesn't matter. Sit down. He may drop in or he may not--I rather
thought he would today. It's a pull up, isn't it, from the Mall? Have a
whisky and soda.'

I stood on the threshold spellbound. It was just the smell that bound
me, the good old smell of oil paints and turpentine and mediums and
varnish and new canvas that you never by any chance put your nose into
in any part of Asia. It carried me back twenty years to old haunts,
old friends, old joys, ideals, theories. Ah, to be young and have a
temperament! For I had one then--that instant in Armour's veranda proved
it to me forever.

'No thanks,' I said. 'If you don't mind I'll just have the smell.'

The young fellow knew at once that I liked the smell. 'Well, have a
chair, anyhow,' he said, and took one himself and sat down opposite me,
letting his lean brown hands fall between his knees.

'Do you mind,' I said, 'if for a minute I sit still and look round?'

He understood again.

'I haven't brought much,' he said, 'I left pretty near everything in
Paris.'

'You have brought a world.' Then after a moment, 'Did you do that?' I
asked, nodding towards a canvas tacked against the wall. It was the head
of a half-veiled Arab woman turned away.

The picture was in the turning away, and the shadow the head-covering
made over the cheek and lips.

'Lord, no! That's Dagnan Bouveret. I used to take my things to him,
and one day he gave me that. You have an eye,' he added, but without
patronage. 'It's the best thing I've got.'

I felt the warmth of an old thrill.

'Once upon a time,' I said, 'I was allowed to have an eye.' The wine,
untasted all those years, went to my head. 'That's a vigorous bit
above,' I continued.

'Oh, well! It isn't really up to much, you know. It's Rosario's. He
photographs mostly, but he has a notion of colour.'

'Really?' said I, thinking with regard to my eye that the sun of that
atrocious country had put it out. 'I expect I've lost it,' I said aloud.

'Your eye? Oh, you'll easily get a fresh one. Do you go home for the
exhibitions?'

'I did once,' I confessed. 'My first leave. A kind of paralysis
overtakes one here. Last time I went for the grouse.'

He glanced at me with his light clear eyes as if for the first time he
encountered a difficulty.

'It's a magnificent country for painting,' he said.

'But not for pictures,' I rejoined. He paid no attention, staring at the
ground and twisting one end of his moustache.

'The sun on those old marble tombs--broad sun and sand--'

'You mean somewhere about Delhi.'

'I couldn't get anywhere near it.' He was not at that moment anywhere
near me. 'But I have thought out a trick or two--I mean to have another
go when it cools off again down there.' He returned with a smile, and
I saw how delicate his face was. The smile turned down with a little
gentle mockery in its lines. I had seen that particular smile only on
the faces of one or two beautiful women. It had a borrowed air upon a
man, like a tiara or an earring.

'There's plenty to paint,' he said, looking at me with an air of
friendly speculation.

'Indeed, yes. And it has never been done. We are sure it has never been
done.'

'"We"--you mean people generally?'

'Not at all. I mean Miss Harris, Miss Harris and myself.'

'Your daughter?'

'My name is Philips,' I reminded him pleasantly, remembering that the
intelligence of clever people is often limited to a single art. 'Miss
Harris is the daughter of Mr. Edward Harris, Secretary of the Government
of India in the Legislative Department. She is fond of pictures. We have
a good many tastes in common. We have always suspected that India had
never been painted, and when we saw your things at the Town Hall we knew
it.'

His queer eyes dilated, and he blushed.

'Oh,' he said, 'it's only one interpretation. It all depends on what a
fellow sees. No fellow can see everything.'

'Till you came,' I insisted, 'nobody had seen anything.'

He shook his head, but I could read in his face that this was not news
to him.

'That is mainly what I came up to tell you,' I continued, 'to beg that
you will go on and on. To hope that you will stay a long time and do a
great deal. It is such an extraordinary chance that any one should turn
up who can say what the country really means.'

He stuck his hands in his pockets with a restive movement. 'Oh, don't
make me feel responsible,' he said, 'I hate that;' and then suddenly he
remembered his manners. 'But it's certainly nice of you to think so,' he
added.

There was something a little unusual in his inflection which led me to
ask at this point whether he was an American, and to discover that he
came from somewhere in Wisconsin, not directly, but by way of a few
years in London and Paris. This accounted in a way for the effect of
freedom in any fortune about him for which I already liked him, and
perhaps partly for the look of unembarrassed inquiry and experiment
which sat so lightly in his unlined face. He came, one realized, out of
the fermentation of new conditions; he never could have been the product
of our limits and systems and classes in England. His surroundings, his
'things,' as he called them, were as old as the sense of beauty, but
he seemed simply to have put them where he could see them, there was no
pose in their arrangement. They were all good, and his delight in them
was plain; but he was evidently in no sense a connoisseur beyond that of
natural instinct. Some of those he had picked up in India I could tell
him about, but I had no impression that he would remember what I said.
There was one Bokhara tapestry I examined with a good deal of interest.

'Yes,' he said, 'they told me I shouldn't get anything as good as that
out here, so I brought it,' but I had to explain to him why it was
anomalous that this should be so.

'It came a good many miles over desert from somewhere,' he remarked, as
I made a note of inquiry as to the present direction of trade in woven
goods from Persia, 'I had to pound it for a week to get the dust out.'

We spent an hour looking over work he had done down in the plains, and
then I took my leave. It did not occur to me at the moment to ask
Armour to come to the club or to offer to do anything for him; all the
hospitality, all that was worth offering seemed so much more at his
disposition than at mine. I only asked if I might come again, mentioning
somewhat shyly that I must have the opportunity of adding, at my
leisure, to those of his pictures that were already mine by transaction
with the secretary of the Art Exhibition. I left him so astonished that
this had happened, so plainly pleased, that I was certain he had never
sold anything before in his life. This impression gave me the uplifted
joy of a discoverer to add to the satisfactions I had already drawn from
the afternoon; and I almost bounded down the hill to the Mall. I left
the pi dog barking in the veranda, and I met Mr. Rosario coming up,
but in my unusual elation I hardly paused to consider either of them
further.

The mare and her groom were waiting on the Mall, and it was only when
I got on her back that the consciousness visited me of something
forgotten. It was my mission--to propose to take Armour, if he were
'possible,' to call upon the Harrises. Oh, well, he was possible enough;
I supposed he possessed a coat, though he hadn't been wearing it; and
I could arrange it by letter. Meanwhile, as was only fair, I turned the
mare in the direction of the drawing-room where I had reason to believe
that Miss Dora Harris was quenching her impatience in tea.

Chapter 2.IV.

The very next morning I met Armour on my way to the office. He was
ambling along on the leanest and most ill-groomed of bazaar ponies,
and he wore a bowler. In Simla sun hats are admissible, straw hats are
presentable, and soft felt hats are superior, but you must not wear a
bowler. I might almost say that if one's glance falls upon a bowler, one
hardly looks further; the expectation of finding an acquaintance under
it is so vain. In this instance, I did look further, fortunately, though
in doing so I was compelled to notice that the bowler was not lifted
in answer to my salutation. Of no importance in itself, of course,
but betraying in Armour a certain lack of observation. I felt the
Departmental Head crumble in me, however, as I recognized him, and I
pulled the mare up in a manner which she plainly resented. It was my
opportunity to do cautiously and delicately what I had omitted the
afternoon before; but my recollection is that I was very clumsy.

I said something about the dust, and he said something about the glare,
and then I could think of nothing better than to ask him if he wouldn't
like to meet a few Simla people.

'Oh, I know lots of people, thanks,' he said. 'It's kind of you to think
of it, all the same, but I've got any amount of friends here.'

I thought of Mr. Rosario, and stood, or sat confounded.

The mare fidgeted; I knocked a beast of a fly off her, and so gained
time.

'This is my second season up here, you know.'

'Your second season!' I exclaimed. 'Where on earth have you been
hiding?'

'Well, I didn't exhibit last year, you see. I'd heard it was a kind of
a toy show, so I thought I wouldn't. I think now that was foolish. But I
got to know quite a number of families.'

'But I am sure there are numbers that you haven't met,' I urged,' or I
should have heard of it.'

He glanced at me with a slight flush. 'If you mean society people,'
he said, 'I don't care about that kind of thing, Mr. Philips. I'm not
adapted to it, and I don't want to be. If any one offered to introduce
me to the Viceroy, I would ask to be excused.'

'Oh, the Viceroy,' I responded, disrespectfully, 'is neither here nor
there. But there are some people, friends of my own, who would like very
much to meet you.'

'By the name of Harris?' he asked. I was too amazed to do anything but
nod. By the name of Harris! The Secretary of the Government of India in
the Legislative Department! The expression, not used as an invocation,
was inexcusable.

'I remember you mentioned them yesterday.'

'Yes,' I said, 'there's a father and daughter. Miss Harris is very
artistic.'

His face clouded, as well it might, at the word. 'Does she paint?' he
asked, so apprehensively that I could not forbear a smile at Dora's
expense. I could assure him that she did not paint, that she had not
painted, at all events, for years, and presently I found myself in
the ridiculous position of using argument to bring a young man to the
Harrises. In the end I prevailed, I know, out of sheer good nature on
Armour's part; he was as innocent as a baby of any sense of opportunity.

We arranged it for the following Friday, but as luck would have it, His
Excellency sent for me at the very hour; we met the messenger. I felt
myself unlucky, but there was nothing for it but that Armour should go
alone, which he did, with neither diffidence nor alacrity, but as if it
were all in the day's work, and he had no reason to be disobliging.

The files were very heavy during the succeeding fortnight, and the
Viceroy quite importunate in his demand for my valuable suggestions.
I was worked off my legs, and two or three times was obliged to deny
myself in replying to notes from Dora suggesting Sunday breakfast or
afternoon tea. Finally, I shook myself free; it was the day she wrote:

'You must come--I can't keep it to myself any longer.'

I half thought Armour would be there, but he wasn't; that is, he was
absent corporeally, but the spirit and expression of him littered
every convenient part. Some few things lay about that I had seen in
the studio, to call it so, but most of the little wooden panels looked
fresh, almost wet, and the air held strongly the fragrance of Armour's
north veranda. In one corner there used to be a Madonna on a carved
easel; the Madonna stood on the floor, and the easel with working pegs
in it held an unfinished canvas. Dora sat in the midst with a distinct
flush--she was inclined to be sallow--and made me welcome in terms
touched with extravagance. She did not rush, however, upon the matter
that was dyeing her cheeks, and I showed myself as little impetuous. She
poured out the tea, and we sat there inhaling, as it were, the aroma of
the thing, while keeping it consciously in the background.

I imagine there was no moment in the time I describe when we enjoyed
Ingersoll Armour so much as at this one, when he lay in his nimbus half
known and wholly suppressed, between us. There were later instances,
perhaps, of deeper satisfaction, but they were more or less perplexed,
and not unobscured by anxiety. That afternoon it was all to know and to
be experienced, with just a delicious foretaste.

I said something presently about Lady Pilkey's picnic on the morrow, to
which we had both been bidden.

'Shall I call for you?' I asked. 'You will ride, of course.'

'Thanks, but I've cried off--I'm going sketching.' Her eyes plainly
added, 'with Ingersoll Armour,' but she as obviously shrank from the
roughness of pitching him in that unconsidered way before us. For some
reason I refrained from taking the cue. I would not lug him in either.

'That is a new accomplishment,' was as much as I felt I could say with
dignity, and she responded:

'Yes, isn't it?'

I felt some slight indignation on Lady Pilkey's account. 'Do you really
think you ought to do things like that at the eleventh hour?' I asked,
but Dora smiled at a glance, the hypocrisy out of my face.

'What does anything matter?' she demanded.

I knew perfectly well the standard by which nothing mattered, and there
was no use, of course, in going on pretending that I did not.

'I assured him that you didn't paint,' I said, accusingly.

'Oh, I had to--otherwise what was there to go upon? He would have been
found only to be lost again. You did not contemplate that?' Miss Harris
inquired sweetly.

'I should have thought it was the surest way of losing him.'

'I can't think why you should be so rude. He observes progress already.'

'With a view to claiming and holding him, would it be of any use,' I
asked, 'for me to start in oils?'

Miss Harris eyed me calmly.

'I don't know,' she said, 'but it doesn't seem the same thing somehow. I
think you had better leave it to me.'

'Indeed, I won't,' I said; 'there is too much in it,' and we smiled
across the gulf of our friendly understanding.

I crossed to the mantelpiece and picked up one of the little wet panels.
There was that in it which explained my friend's exultation much more
plainly than words.

'That is what I am to show him tomorrow,' she exclaimed; 'I think I have
done as he told me. I think it's pretty right.'

Whether it was pretty right or pretty wrong, she had taken in an
extraordinary way an essence out of him. It wasn't of course good,
but his feeling was reflected in it, at once so brilliantly and so
profoundly that it was startling to see.

'Do you think he'll be pleased?' she asked, anxiously.

'I think he'll be astounded,' I said, reserving the rest, and she cried
in her pleasure, 'Oh, you dear man!'

'I see you have taken possession of him,' I went on.

'Ah, body and soul,' Dora rejoined, and it must have been something like
that. I could imagine how she did it; with what wiles of simplicity and
candid good-fellowship she had drawn him to forgetfulness and response,
and how presently his enthusiasm leaped up to answer hers and they had
been caught altogether out of the plane of common relations, and he had
gone away on that disgraceful bazaar pony with a ratified arrangement
to return next day which had been almost taken for granted from the
beginning.

I confess, though I had helped to bring it about, the situation didn't
altogether please me. I did not dream of foolish dangers, but it seemed
to take a little too much for granted; I found myself inwardly demanding
whether, after all, a vivid capacity to make colour conscious was a
sufficient basis on which to bring to Edward Harris's house a young man
about whom we knew nothing whatever else. An instant's regard showed
the scruple fraudulent, it fled before the rush of pleasure with which
I gazed at the tokens he had left behind him. I fell back on my wonder,
which was great, that Dora should have possessed the technique necessary
to take him at a point where he could give her so much that was
valuable.

'Oh, well,' she said when I uttered it, 'you know I made the experiment!
I found out in South Kensington--you can learn that much there--that I
never would be able to paint well enough to make it worth while. So I
dropped it and took a more general line towards life. But I find it very
easy to imagine myself dedicated to that particular one again.'

'You never told me,' I said. Why had I been shut out of that experience?

'I tell you now,' Dora replied, absently, 'when I am able to offer
you the fact with illustrations.' She laughed and dropped a still
illuminated face in the palm of her hand. 'He has wonderfully revived
me,' she declared. 'I could throw, honestly, the whole of Simla
overboard for this.'

'Don't,' I urged, feeling, suddenly, an integral part of Simla.

'Oh, no--what end would be served? But I don't care who knows,' she went
on with a rush, 'that in all life this is what I like best, and people
like Mr. Armour are the people I value most. Heavens, how few of them
there are! And wherever they go how the air clears up round them! It
makes me quite ill to think of the life we lead here--the poverty of it,
the preposterous dullness of it....'

'For goodness' sake,' I said, obscurely irritated, 'don't quote the
bishop. The life holds whatever we put into it.'

'For other people it does, and for us it holds what other people put
into it,' she retorted. 'I don't know whether you think it's adequately
filled with gold lace and truffles.'

'Why should I defend it?' I asked, not knowing indeed why. 'But it has
perhaps a dignity, you know. Ah, you are too fresh from your baptism,'
I continued, as she shook her head and went to the piano. The quality,
whatever it was, that the last fortnight had generated in her, leaped
from her fingers; she played with triumph, elation, intention. The notes
seemed an outlet for the sense of beauty and for power to make it. I had
never heard her play like that before.

It occurred to me to ask when she had done, how far, after a fortnight,
she could throw light on Armour's aims and history, where he had come
from, and the great query with which we first received him, what he
could be doing in Simla. I gathered that she had learned practically
nothing, and had hardly concerned herself to learn anything. What
difference did it make? she asked me. Why should we inquire? Why tack
a theory of origin to a phenomenon of joy? Let us say the wind brought
him, and build him a temple. She was very whimsical up to the furthest
stretch of what could possibly be considered tea-time. When I went
away I saw her go again and sit down at the piano. In the veranda I