the Calcutta
hair-dresser, imagining that they produce things, poor dears, only a
LITTLE less well done than is done at the Lyceum? Nothing is beyond
them. I assure you they are contemplating at the moment 'The Second Mrs.
Tanqueray'. The effect of remoteness from the world, I suppose, and
the enormous mutual appreciation of people who have watched each other
climb. For to arrive officially at Simla they have had to climb in more
ways than one...It is all so hilarious, so high-spirited, so young
and yet, my word! what a cult of official dignity underlying! I saw a
staff-officer in full uniform, red and white feathers and all, going
to the birthday dinner at the Viceroy's the other evening in a
perambulator--rickshaw, you know, such as they have in Japan. That is
typical of the place. All the honours and dignities--and a perambulator
to put them in--or a ridiculous little white-washed house made of mud
and tin, and calling itself Warwick Castle, Blenheim, Abbotsford! They
haven't a very good hold, these Simla residences, and sometimes they
slip fifty yards or so down the mountain-side, but the chimneys (bad pun
coming) are never any more out of drawing than they were before.

'Yet--never forget--the queer little place has a nobility, drawn I
suppose from high standards of conduct in essentials.

'...This matter of precedence is a bore for an outsider. I am very tired
of being taken in to dinner by subalterns, because I have no "official
position." Something of the kind was offered me, by the way, the other
day, by a little gunner with red eyelids, in the Ordnance Department,
named McDermott--Captain McDermott. He took my declining very
cheerfully, said he knew Americans didn't like Englishmen, who hadn't
been taught to pronounce their "g's," but hoped I would change my mind
before the rains, when he was goin' down. Of course I sha'n't. The red
eyelids alone...I am living in a boarding-house precisely under the
deodars, and have "tiffin" with Mrs. Hauksbee every day when neither
of us are having it anywhere else. And I've been told the original of
"General Bangs," "that most immoral man." You remember, don't you, the
heliograph incident--I needn't quote it. It really happened! and the
General still lives, none the worse--perhaps rather greater. Quite half
the people seem materializations of Kipling, and it's very interesting;
but one mustn't say so if one wants to be popular. Talking of
materializations, I saw the origin