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He would take any amount of trouble — he was a selfish man habitually — to meet and forestall, if possible, her wishes. Anything she told him to do was law; and he was, there could be no doubting it, fond of her company so long as she talked to him, and kept on talking about trivialities. But when she launched into expression of her personal views and her wrongs, those small social differences that make the spice of Simla life, Ha
Under the new Post Office, one evening, Mrs. Landys-Haggert turned on him, and spoke her mind shortly and without warning. «Mr. Ha
The queerness of the situation and the reply, made Mrs. Landys-Haggert laugh. Then it all came out; and at the end of Ha
Ha
Ha
When the season ended, Ha
* * *
He got understanding a month later.
A peculiar point of this peculiar country is the way in which a heartless Government transfers men from one end of the Empire to the other. You can never be sure of getting rid of a friend or an enemy till he or she dies. There was a case once — but that’s another story.
Haggert’s Department ordered him up from Dindigul to the Frontier at two days’ notice, and he went through, losing money at every step, from Dindigul to his station. He dropped Mrs. Haggert at Lucknow, to stay with some friends there, to take part in a big ball at the Chutter Munzil, and to come on when he had made the new home a little comfortable. Lucknow was Ha
Whether Mrs. Landys-Haggert saw what was going on in his mind, she alone knows. He seemed to take an unqualified interest in everything co
The last day of her stay at Lucknow came, and Ha
As the train went out slowly, Mrs. Landys-Haggert leaned out of the window to say goodbye — «On second thoughts au revoir, Mr. Ha
Ha
And Mrs. Haggert understood.
WRESSLEY OF THE FOREIGN OFFICE
I closed and drew for my love’s sake,
That now is false to me,
And I slew the Riever of Tarrant Moss,
And set Dumeny free.
And ever they give me praise and gold,
And ever I moan my loss,
For I struck the blow for my false love’s sake,
And not for the men at the Moss.
One of the many curses of our life out here is the want of atmosphere in the painter’s sense. There are no half-tints worth noticing. Men stand out all crude and raw, with nothing to tone them down, and nothing to scale them against. They do their work, and grow to think that there is nothing but their work, and nothing like their work, and that they are the real pivots on which the administration turns. Here is an instance of this feeling. A half-caste clerk was ruling forms in a Pay Office. He said to me — «Do you know what would happen if I added or took away one single line on this sheet?» Then, with the air of a conspirator — «It would disorganize the whole of the Treasury payments throughout the whole of the Presidency Circle! Think of that?»
If men had not this delusion as to the ultra-importance of their own particular employments, I suppose that they would sit down and kill themselves. But their weakness is wearisome, particularly when the listener knows that he himself commits exactly the same sin.
Even the Secretariat believes that it does good when it asks an over-driven Executive Officer to take census of wheat-weevils through a district of five thousand square miles.
There was a man once in the Foreign Office — a man who had grown middle-aged in the department, and was commonly said, by irreverent juniors, to be able to repeat Aitchison’s «Treaties and Su