rieties are simply non-existent; men and women in her eyes
have but one point of interest, and she walks abroad, with her
fashioning fingers, setting in order the only work she cares for. All
the rest is subsidiary, and she is callous to suffering and to death,
indifferent to the Ten Commandments and even to the code of Good
Society.

James at last made the acquaintance of a certain Mrs. Pritchard-Wallace,
the wife of a man in a native regiment, a little, dark-hatred person,
with an olive skin and big brown eyes--rather common, but excessively
pretty. She was the daughter of a riding-master by a Portuguese woman
from Goa, and it had been something of a scandal when
Pritchard-Wallace, who was an excellent fellow, had married her against
the advice of all the regimental ladies. But if those charitable persons
had not ceased to look upon her with doubtful eyes, her wit and her good
looks for others counterbalanced every disadvantage; and she did not
fail to have a little court of subalterns and the like hanging
perpetually about her skirts. At first Mrs. Wallace merely amused James.
Her absolute frivolity, her cynical tongue, her light-heartedness, were
a relief after the rather puritanical atmosphere in which he had passed
his youth; he was astonished to hear the gay contempt which she poured
upon all the things that he had held most sacred--things like the Tower
of London and the British Constitution. Prejudices and cherished beliefs
were dissipated before her sharp-tongued raillery; she was a woman with
almost a witty way of seeing the world, with a peculiarly feminine gift
for putting old things in a new, absurd light. To Mrs. Wallace, James
seemed a miracle of ingenuousness, and she laughed at him continually;
then she began to like him, and took him about with her, at which he was
much flattered.

James had been brought up in the belief that women were fashioned of
different clay from men, less gross, less earthly; he thought not only
that they were pious, sweet and innocent, ignorant entirely of
disagreeable things, but that it was man's first duty to protect them
from all knowledge of the realities of life. To him they were an
ethereal blending of milk-and-water with high principles; it had never
occurred to him that they were flesh and blood, and sense, and fire and
nerves--especially nerves. Most topics, of course, could not be broached
in their presence; in fact, almost the only safe subject of conversation
wa