ashed cotton ceiling; nothing of any value in the way of a
human relation, I am sure, could have originated there. The veranda
was spacious and open, their mutual observation had room and freedom;
I watched it to and fro. I had not long to wait for my reward; the
beautiful candour I expected between them was not ten minutes in coming.
For the sake of it I had taken some trouble, but when I perceived it
revealing I went and sat down beside Judy's husband, Robert Harbottle,
and talked about Pharaoh's split hoof. It was only fair; and when next
day I got their impressions of one another, I felt single-minded and
deserving.

I knew it would be a satisfactory sort of thing to do, but perhaps it
was rather more for Judy's sake than for Anna's that I did it. Mrs.
Harbottle was only twenty-seven then and Robert a major, but he had
brought her to India out of an episode too colour-flushed to tone with
English hedges; their marriage had come, in short, of his divorce, and
as too natural a consequence. In India it is well known that the eye
becomes accustomed to primitive pigments and high lights; the aesthetic
consideration, if nothing else, demanded Robert's exchange. He was lucky
to get a Piffer regiment, and the Twelfth were lucky to get him; we were
all lucky, I thought, to get Judy. It was an opinion, of course, a good
deal challenged, even in Rawul Pindi, where it was thought, especially
in the beginning, that acquiescence was the most the Harbottles could
hope for. That is not enough in India; cordiality is the common right.
I could not have Judy preserving her atmosphere at our tea-parties and
gymkhanas. Not that there were two minds among us about 'the case'; it
was a preposterous case, sentimentally undignified, from some points of
view deplorable. I chose to reserve my point of view, from which I saw
it, on Judy's behalf, merely quixotic, preferring on Robert's just to
close my eyes. There is no doubt that his first wife was odious to a
degree which it is simply pleasanter not to recount, but her malignity
must almost have amounted to a sense of humour. Her detestation of her
cousin Judy Thynne dated much further back than Robert's attachment.
That began in Paris, where Judy, a young widow, was developing a real
vein at Julian's. I am entirely convinced that there was nothing, as
people say, 'in it,' Judy had not a thought at that time that was not
based on Chinese white and permeated with good-fellowship; but there was