marrying a newspaper correspondent--but I pointed to a lifelong
task, with a pension attached, of teaching fat young Bengalis to
draw, and asked her if she saw extravagant romance in that.

They wrote up from Calcutta that they would like to have a look at
Armour before making the final recommendation, and he left us, I
remember, by the mail tonga of the third of June. He dropped into
my office to say goodbye, but I was busy with the Member and could
see nobody, so he left a card with 'P.P.C.' on it. I kept the card
by accident, and I keep it still by design, for the sake of that
inscription.

Strobo had given up his hotel in Simla to start one in Calcutta. It
never occurred to me that Armour might go to Strobo's; but it was,
of course, the natural thing for him to do, especially as Strobo
happened to be in Calcutta himself at the time. He went and stayed
with Strobo, and every day he and the Signor, clad in bath-towels,
lay in closed rooms under punkahs and had iced drinks in the long
tumblers of the East, and smoked and talked away the burden of the
hours.

Strobo was in Calcutta to meet a friend, an Austrian, who was
shortly leaving India in the Messagerie Maritimes steamer Dupleix
after agreeable wanderings disguised as a fakir in Tibet; and to
this friend was attached, in what capacity I never thought well to
inquire, a lady who was a Pole, and played and sang as well as
Strobo fiddled. I believe they dined together every night, this
precious quartet, and exchanged in various tongues their impressions
of India under British control. 'A houri in stays,' the lady who
was a Pole described it. I believe she herself was a houri without