on her, or that she felt that she would leave India safer and more
wholesome than she had found it, with one fraction less of wild
beast per million of inhabitants. The compelling motive for her
sudden deviation towards the footsteps of Nimrod was the fact that
Loona Bimberton had recently been carried eleven miles in an
aeroplane by an Algerian aviator, and talked of nothing else; only
a personally procured tiger-skin and a heavy harvest of Press
photographs could successfully counter that sort of thing. Mrs.
Packletide had already arranged in her mind the lunch she would
give at her house in Curzon Street, ostensibly in Loona
Bimberton's honour, with a tiger-skin rug occupying most of the
foreground and all of the conversation. She had also already
designed in her mind the tiger-claw brooch that she was going to
give Loona Bimberton on her next birthday. In a world that is
supposed to be chiefly swayed by hunger and by love Mrs.
Packletide was an exception; her movements and motives were
largely governed by dislike of Loona Bimberton.

Circumstances proved propitious. Mrs. Packletide had offered a
thousand rupees for the opportunity of shooting a tiger without
overmuch risk or exertion, and it so happened that a neighbouring
village could boast of being the favoured rendezvous of an animal
of respectable antecedents, which had been driven by the
increasing infirmities of age to abandon game-killing and confine
its appetite to the smaller domestic animals. The prospect of
earning the thousand rupees had stimulated the sporting and
commercial instinct of the villagers; children were posted night
and day on the outskirts of the local jungle to head the tiger
back in the unlikely event of his attempting to roam away to fresh
hunting-grounds, and the cheaper kinds of goats were left about