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