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