administered with long sticks, in the open under trees; could speak
Urdu and even rough Punjabi with a fluency that was envied by her
seniors; had altogether fallen out of the habit of writing to her
aunts in England, or cutting the pages of the English magazines; had
been through a very bad cholera year, seeing sights unfit to be told;
and had wound up her experiences by six weeks of typhoid fever,
during which her head had been shaved; and hoped to keep her
twenty-third birthday that September. It is conceivable that her
aunts would not have approved of a girl who never set foot on the
ground if a horse were within hail; who rode to dances with a shawl
thrown over her skirt; who wore her hair cropped and curling all over
her head; who answered indifferently to the name of William or Bill;
whose speech was heavy with the flowers of the vernacular; who could
act in amateur theatricals, play on the banjo, rule eight servants
and two horses, their accounts and their diseases, and look men
slowly and deliberately between the eyes--yea, after they had
proposed to her and been rejected.

'I like men who do things,' she had confided to a man in the
Educational Department, who was teaching the sons of cloth merchants
and dyers the beauty of Wordsworth's 'Excursion' in annotated
cram-books; and when he grew poetical, William explained that she
'didn't understand poetry very much; it made her head ache,' and
another broken heart took refuge at the Club. But it was all
William's fault. She delighted in hearing men talk of their own work,
and that is the most fatal way of bringing a man to your feet.

Scott had known her more or less for some three years, meeting her,
as a rule, under canvas when his camp and her brother's joined for a
day on the edge of the Indian Desert. He had danced with her several