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