g
and dining there were satisfactions that had been somehow overlooked.
The Surgeon-Major's wife said it was delightful to meet Mrs. Harbottle,
she seemed to enjoy everything so thoroughly; the Surgeon-Major looked
at her critically and asked her if she were quite sure she hadn't a
night temperature. He was a Scotchman. One night Colonel Harbottle,
hearing her give away the last extra, charged her with renewing her
youth.

'No, Bob,' she said, 'only imitating it.'

Ah, that question of her youth. It was so near her--still, she told
me once, she heard the beat of its flying, and the pulse in her veins
answered the false signal. That was afterward, when she told the truth.
She was not so happy when she indulged herself otherwise. As when she
asked one to remember that she was a middle-aged woman, with middle-aged
thoughts and satisfactions.

'I am now really happiest,' she declared, 'when the Commissioner takes
me in to dinner, when the General Commanding leads me to the dance.'

She did her best to make it an honest conviction. I offered her a recent
success not crowned by the Academy, and she put it down on the table.
'By and by,' she said. 'At present I am reading Pascal and Bossuet.'
Well, she was reading Pascal and Bossuet. She grieved aloud that most
of our activities in India were so indomitably youthful, owing to the
accident that most of us were always so young. 'There is no dignified
distraction in this country,' she complained, 'for respectable ladies
nearing forty.' She seemed to like to make these declarations in the
presence of Somers Chichele, who would look at her with a little queer
smile--a bad translation, I imagine, of what he felt.

She gave herself so generously to her seniors that somebody said Mrs.
Harbottle's girdle was hung with brass hats. It seems flippant to add
that her complexion was as honest as the day, but the fact is that the
year before Judy had felt compelled, like the rest of us, to repair just
a little the ravages of the climate. If she had never done it one would
not have looked twice at the absurdity when she said of the powder-puff
in the dressing-room, 'I have raised that thing to the level of an
immorality,' and sailed in to dance with an uncompromising expression
and a face uncompromised. I have not spoken of her beauty; for one
thing it was not always there, and there were people who would deny
it altogether, or whose considered comment was, 'I wouldn't call
her plain.'