augh as she
wrote the notes. Then the two would ride to the Post-office together.

Now, Simla is a strange place and its customs are peculiar; nor is
any man who has not spent at least ten seasons there qualified to pass
judgment on circumstantial evidence, which is the most untrustworthy in
the Courts. For these reasons, and for others which need not appear,
I decline to state positively whether there was anything irretrievably
wrong in the relations between the Man's Wife and the Tertium Quid. If
there was, and hereon you must form your own opinion, it was the Man's
Wife's fault. She was kittenish in her manners, wearing generally an
air of soft and fluffy innocence. But she was deadlily learned and
evil-instructed; and, now and again, when the mask dropped, men saw
this, shuddered and almost drew back. Men are occasionally particular,
and the least particular men are always the most exacting.

Simla is eccentric in its fashion of treating friendships. Certain
attachments which have set and crystallised through half-a-dozen seasons
acquire almost the sanctity of the marriage bond, and are revered as
such. Again, certain attachments equally old, and, to all appearance,
equally venerable, never seem to win any recognised official status;
while a chance-sprung acquaintance, not two months born, steps into the
place which by right belongs to the senior. There is no law reducible to
print which regulates these affairs.

Some people have a gift which secures them infinite toleration, and
others have not. The Man's Wife had not. If she looked over the garden
wall, for instance, women taxed her with stealing their husbands. 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 a