And as I wondered, came this swift reply:--
'Each star is some soul's inmost aim, and when
The angels don't approve, it is returned
To feed the base-born flame by which it burned.
The nice, they keep until--life's struggle striven--
The owners find them at the gates of heaven.'"
"Striven--heaven!" groaned the Commissioner, amid the clapping of hands. "My dear madam, did I commit such a crime--I mean rhyme? But the poet's right. Ye can't go wide of the mark, annyhow, even in a song, but you're sure to find the fact again in the heart of a friend."
So, with that curiously light-hearted, almost reckless, frivolity of Indian society--a not unnatural recoil, perhaps, from the perpetual presence of the greatest social problem the world has ever seen, or is likely to see, that is, the mutual assimilation of East and West without injury to either--the little company of English men and women, empire makers and breakers, drifted out into the sunshine, and so on to the Viceroy's private enclosure, where the band, weary of national anthems, was already at work on a selection of street tunes, beginning with "Tommy, make room for your uncle."
So the pageant of power passed into a garden-party, and nothing remained to show the hand-grip which had made that garden out of a wilderness, to tell of the tireless effort to solve the problem, the ceaseless striving to be just, which underlay all the quips and cranks, the foibles and follies, of the great camp, save the premature baldness of a few heads, as their owners fought desperately at badminton; fought to prevent a child's shuttlecock from falling in the wrong court!
A fight which was watched with blank courtesy, as a further exhibition of sheer eccentricity, by those of the jewelled and brocaded owners of titles who had the entrée to this Holy of Holies.