natives all so slenderly built and watch the British youth in shirt
sleeves and thin tweeds playing billiards--they were not above the
average physique of their class, mostly young fellows who had already
been through campaigns--and you noted the muscles showing through their
thin clothes and compared them with native figures, and it did not seem
surprising that one of them could keep in order quite a number of such
wisps as the billiard markers for example. But up north they say the
natives are stronger and bigger than here.

Every now and then a boy passed round bags of chalk on hot water
enamelled plates to dry the players' hands and cues, which gives one an
idea of the damp heat of Bombay.

... Now my friend says he's off to dress, and we go into the
dressing-room--that is a sight for a nouveau! Dozens of dark men in
white linen clothes and turbans are waiting on these little chaps from
home, as they drop in. They are tubbed and towelled, shirts studded and
put on, and are fitted without hardly lifting a hand themselves till
they put the finishing touch to hair and moustache at the glasses and
dressing-tables that are fixed round the pillars--sounds like
effeminacy, but it is not, for it is far more tiring for a man to be
dressed here by two skilful servants than it is to dash into his clothes
at home by himself. If you were to dress here without help you might as
well have dropped into your bath all standing, you would be so wet and
uncomfortable; but all the same I think it is stupid the way we people
cling to a particular style of evening dress regardless of
circumstances.

Then home to the Taj in the dusk through a crowd of natives jammed tight
on the Bundar, all looking one way breathlessly at the fleet's fireworks
and search-lights. You touch them on the shoulder and say, "With your
leave," and they make way most politely, and you wonder if it is because
you are British or because they have bare toes.

I went to the theatre in the evening, a native Theatre Royal. None of my
relations or friends seemed interested, so I availed myself of the kind
offer of guidance given me by a fellow artist, an amateur painter, but a
professional cutter of clothes. I expected something rather picturesque,
possibly rather squalid, but found it intensely interesting and
characteristic and very clean, a cross-between a little French theatre,
say in Monte Parnasse, and one of the lesser London theatres. The acting
was French i