When Leonie returned to Calcutta she found that the tale of her courageous act which had preceded her, and of which home and local papers had exhausted themselves in praise, had not served to endear her to that little white community, which suffers from social myopia, and the self-adjusted chains of what it most mistakenly calls caste.
Not likely that the feminine members of Jute, military, railway, or law circles would open their arms any wider to this young, and beautiful, widowed creature with the mop of naturally curling hair, now that, if so minded, she could verbally and positively flap one of the finest tiger skins that had ever come out of Bengal in their heat-stricken faces.
In fact some of the young ones as they wrestled with the nightly problem of their own dank, straight particular bit of woman's glory, would doubtless, if questioned, have upheld the Hindu custom of completely shaving the widowed head.
Many, in fact, had been the meetings of these younger mem-sahibs in bungalows, or flats, at Firpoes, or in clubs, where, under the pretext of criticising the latest fashions from overseas, they discussed the pros and cons of accepting this person into the haven of their Anglo-Indian bosom.
The elder ones kept out of the clatter, having suffered and fought in similar crises in their own day as had their mothers, and their mothers' mothers before them since the days before the mutiny; being moreover resigned to the corrugated appearance of their faces, and the, in consequence, perambulatory instincts of their lords.
"Her undies," said a woman who, with the excuse of borrowing a book, had essayed to spy out the land of Leonie's cabin. "I saw her running ribbons in them—the most ex-quisite crêpe de Chine, hand embroidered and trimmed with real lace!"
"How de trop!" had answered a matron, whose household linge and personal lingerie showed complete only in the sections of finger napkins and undervests, as is the way of a careless, untidy woman's linen stock.
"Well, that's easily understood," chimed in a third. "After all she is trade."
And the no's had carried it.
Wherefore, although in ignorance of the verdict, she did exactly what every other woman did, and went where they went, she most certainly did not have what one would call a good time. She loved the Maidan and golf at the Jodhpur Club, or Tollygunge, before breakfast; she cordially loathed shopping and duty calls; grudged the hours lost out of life in the daily afternoon siesta, and took part in dances, bridge, dinners, and all the usual monotonous effort to kill time, with the air of an indifferent, disgruntled statue.