to fish when he inwardly wanted to sleep in a deck chair
or to talk when he had a headache. Such men have their value as tame
cats and Victoria did not avoid his cheery neighbourhood. But he was
summed up in the small fact which she recalled with gentle amusement a
long time after: she had never known his name. For her, as for the
ship's company, he was 'Bobby,' merely Bobby.

The female section too could detain none but cats and hens, as Victoria
put it. She had moved too long like a tiny satellite in the orbit of Mrs
Colonel So-and-So to return to the little group which slumbered all day
by the funnel dreaming aloud the petty happenings of Bombay. The heavy
rains at Chandraga, the simply awful things that had been said about an
A.D.C. and Mrs Bryan, and the scandalous way in which a Babu had been
made a judge, all this filled her with an extraordinary weariness. She
felt, in the presence of these remains of her daily life, as she would
when confronted for the third time with the cold leg of mutton.

True there was Cairns, a man right enough and jovial in spite of his
cynical assumption that nothing was worth anything. He could produce
passing fair aphorisms, throw doubts on the value of success and
happiness. There was nothing, however, to hold on to. Victoria had not
found in him a teacher or a helper. He was merely destructive of thought
and epicurean in taste. Convinced that wine, woman and song were quite
valueless things, he nevertheless knew the best Ruedesheimer and had an
eye for the droop of Victoria's shoulders.

Cairns obviously liked Victoria. He did not shun his fellow passengers,
for he considered that the dullest people are the most interesting, yet
she could not help noticing from time to time that his eyes followed her
round. He was a good big man and she knew that his thick hand, a little
swollen and sunburnt, would be a good thing to touch. But there was in
him none of that subtle magnetism that grasps and holds. He was coarse,
perhaps a little vulgar at heart.

Thus Victoria had roamed aimlessly over the ship, visiting even the bows
where, everlastingly, a lascar seemed to brood in fixed attitudes as a
Budh dreaming of Nirvana. She often wandered in the troop-deck filled
with the womankind and children of the non-coms. Without disliking
children she could find no attraction in these poor little faded things
born to be scorched by the Indian sun. The women too, mostly yellow and
faded, always re