zaar pony with a ratified arrangement
to return next day which had been almost taken for granted from the
beginning.

I confess, though I had helped to bring it about, the situation didn't
altogether please me. I did not dream of foolish dangers, but it seemed
to take a little too much for granted; I found myself inwardly demanding
whether, after all, a vivid capacity to make colour conscious was a
sufficient basis on which to bring to Edward Harris's house a young man
about whom we knew nothing whatever else. An instant's regard showed
the scruple fraudulent, it fled before the rush of pleasure with which
I gazed at the tokens he had left behind him. I fell back on my wonder,
which was great, that Dora should have possessed the technique necessary
to take him at a point where he could give her so much that was
valuable.

'Oh, well,' she said when I uttered it, 'you know I made the experiment!
I found out in South Kensington--you can learn that much there--that I
never would be able to paint well enough to make 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 has
perhaps a dignity, you know. Ah, you are too fresh from your baptism,'
I con