ent he had no announcement to make. Lady Pilkey
told me she thought it very romantic--like marrying a newspaper
correspondent--but I pointed to a lifelong task, with a pension
attached, of teaching fat young Bengalis to draw, and asked her if she
saw extravagant romance in that.

They wrote up from Calcutta that they would like to have a look at
Armour before making the final recommendation, and he left us, I
remember, by the mail tonga of the third of June. He dropped into my
office to say goodbye, but I was busy with the Member and could see
nobody, so he left a card with 'P.P.C.' on it. I kept the card
by accident, and I keep it still by design, for the sake of that
inscription.

Strobo had given up his hotel in Simla to start one in Calcutta. It
never occurred to me that Armour might go to Strobo's; but it was, of
course, the natural thing for him to do, especially as Strobo happened
to be in Calcutta himself at the time. He went and stayed with Strobo,
and every day he and the Signor, clad in bath-towels, lay in closed
rooms under punkahs and had iced drinks in the long tumblers of the
East, and smoked and talked away the burden of the hours.

Strobo was in Calcutta to meet a friend, an Austrian, who was shortly
leaving India in the Messagerie Maritimes steamer Dupleix after
agreeable wanderings disguised as a fakir in Tibet; and to this friend
was attached, in what capacity I never thought well to inquire, a lady
who was a Pole, and played and sang as well as Strobo fiddled. I believe
they dined together every night, this precious quartet, and exchanged
in various tongues their impressions of India under British control.
'A houri in stays,' the lady who was a Pole described it. I believe she
herself was a houri without them. And at midnight, when the south wind
was cool and strong from the river, Strobo and Armour would walk up
Chowringhee Road and look at the red brick School of Art from the
outside in the light of the street lamps, as a preliminary to our
friend's final acceptance of the task of superintending it from within.

We in Simla, of course, knew nothing of all this at the time; the
details leaked out later when Strobo came up again. I began to feel some
joyful anxiety when in a letter dated a week after Armour's arrival in
Calcutta, the Director of Public Instruction wrote to inquire whether he
had yet left Simla; but the sweet blow did not fall with any precision
or certainty until the newspaper a