“Mrs. Church has a very interesting face, don’t you think?”
“Very,” Ancram replied unhesitatingly.
“She looks as if she cared for beautiful things. Not only pictures and things, but beautiful conceptions—ideas, characteristics.”
“I understand,” Ancram returned: “she does.”
There was a pause, while they listened to the wail of the jackals, which had grown wild and high and tumultuous. As it died away, Rhoda looked up with a little smile.
“I like that,” she said; “it is about the only thing out here that is quite irrepressible. And—you knew her well at Kaligurh?”
“I think I may say I did,” Ancram replied, tossing the end of his cigarette down among the hibiscus bushes. “My dear girl, you must come in. There is nothing like a seductive moonlight night in India to give one fever.”
“I congratulate you,” said Miss Daye—and her tone had a defiance which she did not intend, though one could not say that she was unaware of its cynicism—“I congratulate you upon knowing her well. It is always an advantage to know the wife of the Lieutenant-Governor well. The most delightful things come of it—Commissionerships, and all sorts of things. I hope you will make her understand the importance of the Vedic Books in their bearing upon the modern problems of government.”
“You are always asking me to make acknowledgments—you want almost too many; but since it amuses you, I don’t mind.” Rhoda noted the little gleam in his eyes that contradicted this. “Sanscrit is to me now exactly what Greek was at Oxford—a stepping-stone, and nothing more. One must do something to distinguish oneself from the herd; and in India, thank fortune, it’s easy enough. There’s an enormous field, and next to nobody to beat. Bless you, a Commissariat Colonel can give himself an aureole of scientific discovery out here if he cares to try! If I hadn’t taken up Sanscrit and Hinduism, I should have gone in for palæontology, or conchology, or folk-lore, or ferns. Anything does: only the less other people know about it the better; so I took Sanscrit.” A combined suggestion of humour and candour gradually accumulated in Mr. Ancram’s sentences, which came to a climax when he added, “You don’t think it very original to discover that!”
“And the result of being distinguished from the herd?”