She complained pathetically that she was not allowed to
choose her own friends. When she put up her big white muff to her
lips, and gazed over it and under her eyebrows at you as she said
this thing, you felt that she had been infamously misjudged, and
that all the other women's instincts were all wrong; which was
absurd. She was not allowed to own the Tertium Quid in peace;
and was so strangely constructed that she would not have enjoyed
peace had she been so permitted. She preferred some semblance of
intrigue to cloak even her most commonplace actions.
After two months of riding, first round Jakko, then Elysium, then
Summer Hill, then Observatory Hill, then under Jutogh, and lastly
up and down the Cart Road as far as the Tara Devi gap in the dusk,
she said to the Tertium Quid, 'Frank, people say we are too much
together, and people are so horrid.'
The Tertium Quid pulled his moustache, and replied that horrid
people were unworthy of the consideration of nice people.
'But they have done more than talk they have written written to my
hubby I'm sure of it,' said the Man's Wife, and she pulled a letter
from her husband out of her saddle-pocket and gave it to the
Tertium Quid.
It was an honest letter, written by an honest man, then stewing in
the Plains on two hundred rupees a month (for he allowed his wife
eight hundred and fifty), and in a silk banian and cotton trousers.
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