oward 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 note-book; 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 light-hearted, so general, 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 memsahibs 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, visions in dazzling
complexions and long kid gloves, rattling up in third-class
ticca-gharries, with a wisp of fodder clinging to their skirts. It was
less interesting still when they belonged to the other class, the shabby
ladies, nearly always in black, with husbands in the Small Cause Court,
or sons before the police magistrate, who came to get it, if possible,
"kept out of the paper." Successful or not, these always wept on their
way out, and nothing could be more depressing. The only gleam of
entertainment to be got out of a lady visitor to the manager-sahib
occurred when the female form enshrined the majestic personality of a
boarding-house madam, whose asylum for respectable young men in leading
Calcutta firms had been maliciously traduced in the local columns of the
_Chronicle_--a lady who had never known what a bailiff looked like in
the lifetime of her first husband, or h