al of Crawford's Mr. Isaacs, too, the
other day. He used to be a diamond agent among the native princes when
Crawford knew him. When I saw him he was auctioning off his collection
of curios and things. These types of novelists look wonderfully little
impaired; I suppose it's the dry air.

'P.S.--Brookes is also quite happy. She was much struck, on arriving, by
an apparent anomaly in nature. "Have you noticed, ma'am," said she, "how
at this height all the birds are crows and monkeys?"'

Miss Anderson described Simla exhaustively in her letters to New
York. She touched upon almost every feature, from Mrs. Mickie and Mrs.
Gammidge, whose husbands were perspiring in the Plains, and nobody
telling them anything, to the much larger number of ladies interested in
the work of the Young Women's Christian Association; from the 'type' of
the Military Secretary to the Viceroy to that of Ali Buksh, who sold raw
turquoises in a little carved shop in the bazaar. I should like to quote
more of her letters, but if I did I should find nothing about Colonel
Horace Innes, who represented--she often acknowledged to herself--her
only serious interest. Miss Anderson took the world at its own
light valuation as it came; but she had a scale of recognitions and
acceptances, which she kept apart for the very few, and Innes had
claimed a place in it the first time they met. It seems a trifle
ungrateful that she should have left him out, since it was he who gave
her a standard by which to measure the frivolity of Simla. He went to
gymkhanas--if he knew she was going--but he towered almost pictorially
above them; and when he talked to Madeline his shoulders expressed a
resentment of possible interruptions that isolated him still further.
I would not suggest that he was superior by conviction; he was only
intent, whereas most of the other people were extremely diffused,
and discriminating, while the intimacies of the rest were practically
coextensive with Government House list. Neither, for his part, would he
admit that the tone of Simla was as wholly flippant as I have implied.
They often talked about it; he recognized it as a feature likely to
compel the attention of people from other parts of the world; and
one afternoon he asked her, with some directness, if she could see no
tragedies underneath.

'Tragedies of the heart?' she asked. 'Oh, I can not take them seriously.
The emotion is so ephemeral! A woman came to tea with me three days
ago, an