“Well, dear lady, don’t you think they’re rather ostentatious? I was guilty of a little showing off to-day, when I played that foolish trick with my regular troops. But think of the Maharaja up yonder”—he pointed up to the firmament outside—“who night after night whistles up his glittering legions, and puts them through their deadly punctual drill, as much as to say, ‘See what a devil of a fellow I am!’ Do you think it quite in good taste, Madam?”
The Punjabi mem-sahib was only veneered on the vicarage girl; Lucilla was shocked, and tried not to show it, playing the game, and with a forced, thin smile studied her shoe.
But Traherne laughed frankly. “I’m afraid you’re jealous, Raja! You don’t like having to play second fiddle to a still more absolute ruler.”
“Perhaps you’re right, Doctor,” the Rajah owned; “perhaps it’s partly that. But there’s something more to it. I can’t help resenting—”
He interrupted himself to urge Crespin to “try” the Kümmel a servant was offering him.
Lucilla bit her lip to keep back the, “Don’t, Antony, please don’t,” that she wanted to say.
“What is it you resent?” Traherne asked.
“Oh,” Rukh said, “the respect paid to mere size—to the immensity, as they call it, of the universe. Are we to worship a god because he’s big?”
“If you resent his bigness, what do you say to his littleness?” Traherne objected. “The microscope, you know, reveals him no less than the telescope.”
“And reveals him,” Rukh added, “in the form of death-dealing specks of matter, which you, I understand, Doctor, are impiously proposing to exterminate.”