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