et the air was gay with the dimpling of piano notes,
and looking up one saw the bright sunlight fall on yellow stuccoed flats
above the shops and the offices. There the pleasant north wind blew
banners of muslin curtains out of wide windows, and little gardens of
palms in pots showed behind the balustrades of the flat roofs whenever
a storey ran short. Everywhere was a subtle contagion of momentary
well-being, a sense of lifted burden. The stucco streets were too
slovenly to be purely joyous, but a warm satisfaction brooded in them,
the pariahs blinked at one genially, there was a note of cheer even in
the cheeling of the kites where they sat huddled on the roof-cornices or
circled against the high blue sky. It was enjoyable to be abroad, in
the brushing fellowship of the pavements, in touch with brown humility
half-clad and going afoot, since even brown humility seemed well
affected toward the world, alert and content. The air was full of the
comfortable flavour of food-stuffs and spiced luxuries, and the incense
of wayside trees; it was as if the sun laid a bland compelling hand upon
the city, bidding strange flowers bloom and strange fruits increase.
Brokers' gharries rattled past, each holding a pale young man
preoccupied with a notebook; where the bullock-carts gathered themselves
together and blocked the road the pale young men put excited heads out
of the gharry windows and used remarkable imprecations. One of them, as
Hilda turned into the compound of the Calcutta Chronicle, leaned out to
take off his hat, and sent her up to the office of that journal in the
pleasant reflection of his infinite interest in life. "Upon my word,"
she said to herself as she ascended the stairs behind the lean legs of
a Mussulman servant in a dirty shirt and an embroidered cap, "he's so
lighthearted, so genial, that one doubts the very tremendous effect even
of a failure like the one he contemplates."

She sent her card in to the manager-sahib by the lean Mussulman, and
followed it past the desks of two or three Bengali clerks, who hardly
lifted their well-oiled heads from their account-books to look at
her--so many mem sahibs to whose enterprises the Chronicle gave
prominence came to see the manager-sahib, and they were so much alike.
At all events they carried a passport to indifference in the fact that
they all wanted something, and it was clear to the meanest intelligence
that they appeared to be more magnificent than they were, v