d again, a morning was consumed in returning calls,
an expenditure of time which it is needless to say that he sorely
grudged. "Happily, the good people here are too busy to be at home.
Except the parsons, they are all usefully occupied somewhere or other,
so that I have only to leave cards; but the reverend gentlemen are
always within doors in the heat of the day, lying on their backs,
regretting breakfast, longing for tiffin, and crying out for lemonade."
After lunch he sate with Mrs. Trevelyan, translating Greek or reading
French for her benefit; and Scribe's comedies and Saint Simon's Memoirs
beguiled the long languid leisure of the Calcutta afternoon, while the
punkah swung overhead, and the air came heavy and scented through the
moistened grass-matting which shrouded the windows. At the approach of
sunset, with its attendant breeze, he joined his sister in her drive
along the banks of the Hooghly; and they returned by starlight,--too
often to take part in a vast banquet of forty guests, dressed as
fashionably as people can dress at ninety degrees East from Paris; who,
one and all, had far rather have been eating their curry, and drinking
their bitter beer, at home, in all the comfort of muslin and nankeen.
Macaulay is vehement in his dislike of "those great formal dinners,
which unite all the stiffness of a levee to all the disorder and
discomfort of a two-shilling ordinary. Nothing can be duller. Nobody
speaks except to the person next him. The conversation is the most
deplorable twaddle, and, as I always sit next to the lady of the highest
rank, or, in other words, to the oldest, ugliest, and proudest woman in
the company, I am worse off than my neighbours."

Nevertheless he was far too acute a judge of men to undervalue the
special type of mind which is produced and fostered by the influences of
an Indian career. He was always ready to admit that there is no better
company in the world than a young and rising civilian; no one who has
more to say that is worth hearing, and who can say it in a manner better
adapted to interest those who know good talk from bad. He delighted in
that freedom from pedantry, affectation, and pretension which is one of
the most agreeable characteristics of a service, to belong to which
is in itself so effectual an education, that a bore is a phenomenon
notorious everywhere within a hundred miles of the station which has the
honour to possess him, and a fool is quoted by name throughout