, to underline their scattered insignificance, hinting that the
Maidan at its pleasure might surge over them altogether. Calcutta, the
teeming capital, lived in the streets and gullies behind that chaste
frontage, and quarrelled over drainage schemes; but out here cattle
grazed in quiet companies, and squirrels played on the boles of the
trees. Calcutta the capital indeed was superimposed; one felt that
always at this time, when the glow came and stood in the air among
the tamarinds, and there was nothing anywhere but luminous space
and indolent stillness, and the wrangling and winging of crows. What
persisted then under the span of the sky, was the old India of rich
tradition, and a bullock beneath the yoke, jogging through the evening
to his own place where the blue haze hid the little huts on the rim of
the city, the real India, and the rest was fiction and fabrication.

The grass was crisp and pleasant. Hilda deliberately sought its solace
for her feet, letting their pressure linger. All day long the sun had
been drawing the fragrance and the life out of it, and now the air had a
sweet, warm, and grateful scent, like that of harvests. The crickets had
been at it since five o'clock, and though the city rose not half a mile
across the grass, it was the crickets she heard and listened to. In
making private statements of things, the crickets offered a chorus
of agreement, and they never interrupted. Not that she had much to
consider, poor girl, which lent itself to a difference of opinion. One
might have thought her, to meet a situation at any point like her own,
not badly equipped. She had all the argument--which is like saying all
the arms--and the most accurate understanding; but the only practical
outcome of these things had been an intimate lesson in the small value
of the intelligence, that flavoured her state with cynicism and made it
more piquant. She did not altogether scorn her own intelligence as the
result, because it had always admitted the existence of dominating
facts that belonged to life and not to reason; it was only the absurd
unexpectedness of coming across one herself. One might think round such
a fact and talk round it--there were less exquisite satisfactions--but
it was not to be cowed or abated, and in the end the things one said
were only words.

Out there in the grassy spaces she let her thoughts flow through her
veins with her blood, warm and free. The primitive things she saw helped
her to a