the man's
blind unintentional neglect of the woman for whom he would wring the
last blood-drop out of his heart, you have the nucleus of more than
half the pitiful domestic tragedies of India. It is the crucial
moment, the genesis of a hundred unsuspected possibilities, this first
divergence of the man and woman, along separate paths of interest.
Love may be strong enough to stand the strain, but it will be love
debarred from that intimate fusion of heart and brain which alone
constitutes true marriage. The other kind is at best a permanent
'friendship recognised by the police':--a tacit confession of failure
which this high-hearted, if contrarious couple were by no means minded
to arrive at, now or ever. But there is no warning sign-post at the
turn of the road; and already their feet were nearing it, without
knowledge that its easy gradient slips into the Valley of Dry Bones.

Quita, however, was in a better case than many wives so circumstanced;
in that her art was no mere distraction for spare hours, but a living
reality; though, unhappily, a capricious one. And now when she would
have returned to it in earnest after months of philandering with brush
and pencil, it stood aloof, unmanageable as Eldred himself! She was
too genuinely an artist to attempt the completion of an imaginative
picture against the stream; and for fresh work, fresh mental stimulus
was needed. This was not readily to be found in the everyday
happenings--the riding, tennis, and gatherings at the Club
Gardens--that made up the cold-weather life at Dera Ishmael; and she
had little taste for small social or domestic amenities, in themselves.
The call of the wild was in her blood. One might as well hope to
domesticate a sea-gull as a woman of this type. She managed her
household on broad lines, ignoring minor details, and Zyarulla, to his
secret relief, found himself still the lynx-eyed custodian of the
Sahib's _Izzat_[1] in houses and compound, still the controller of his
petty cash. Quita received his monthly account--plus a minute
percentage on each item--in perfect good faith. His visions of
possible dismissal evaporated. He heartily commended his master's
choice of a wife; and, in moments of expansion over the evening hookah,
confided to the Khansamah--a friend and ally in the matter of
accounts--his conviction that Mem Sahibs who made pictures were of a
different _jat_ to those who played tennis, harried their ayahs, and
rode rough