"But surely—'distance lends enchantment'——?"
"It depends a good deal on the view!"
At that moment, up came Hayes, with his ineffable air of giving a cachet to any one he honoured with his favour. And Miss Arden hailed him, as if they had not met for a week.
Thus encouraged, of course he clung like a limpet; and reverted to some subject they had been discussing, tacitly isolating Roy.
For a few exasperating moments, he stood his ground, counting on bridge to remove the limpet. But when Hayes refused a pressing invitation to join Mrs Ranyard's table, Roy gave it up, and deliberately walked away.
Only Mr Elton remained sitting near the fireplace. His look of undisguised pleasure, at Roy's approach, atoned for a good deal; and they renewed their talk where it had broken off. Roy almost forgot he was speaking to a senior official; freely expressed his own thoughts; and even ventured to comment on the strange detachment of Anglo-Indians, in general, from a land full of such vast and varied interests, lying at their very doors.
"Perhaps—I misjudge them," he added with the unfailing touch of modesty that was not least among his charms. "But to me it sometimes seems as if a curtain hung between their eyes and India. And—it's catching. In some subtle way this little concentrated world, within a world, seems to draw one's receptiveness away from it all. Is that very sweeping, sir?"
A smile dawned in Mr Elton's rather mournful eyes. "In a sense—it's painfully true. But the fact is—Anglo-Indian life can't be fairly judged from the outside. It has to be lived before its insidiousness can be suspected." He moistened his lips and caressed his chin with a large, sensitive hand. "Happily—there are a good many exceptions."
"If I wasn't talking to one of them, sir—I wouldn't have ventured!" said Roy; and the friendly smile deepened.
"All the same," Elton went on, "there are those who assert that it is half the secret of our success; that India conquered the conquerors, who lived with her and so lost their virility. Yet in our earlier days, when the personal touch was a reality, we did achieve a better relation all round. Of course the present state of affairs is the inevitable fruit of our whole system. By the Anglicising process, we have spread all over India a vast layer of minor officials some six million persons deep! Consider, my dear young man, the significance of those figures. We reduce the European staff. We increase the drudgery of their office work—and we wonder why the Sahib and the peasant are no longer personal friends——!"