She was going to reply with one of her bright, easy cynicisms, and then for some reason changed her mind. “I don’t know about the advantage of very deep affections,” she said involuntarily, and there was no flippancy in her tone. Doyle fancied that he detected a note of pathos instead, but perhaps he was looking for it.
They were walking with a straggling company of baboos in white muslin down a double row of plantains towards the wrestling ring. Involuntarily he made their pace slower.
“You can’t be touched by that ignoble spirit of the age—already.”
Miss Daye felt her moral temperature fall several degrees from the buoyant condition in which she contrived to keep it as a rule. To say she experienced a chill in the region of her conscience is perhaps to put it grotesquely, but she certainly felt inclined to ask Philip Doyle with some astonishment what difference it made to him.
“The spirit of the age is an annoying thing. It robs one of all originality.”
“Pray,” he said, “be original in some other direction. You have a very considerable choice.”
His manner disarmed his words. It was grave, almost pleading. She wondered why she was not angry, but the fact remained that she was only vaguely touched, and rather unhappy. Then he spoiled it.
“In my trade we get into dogmatic ways,” he apologised. “You won’t mind the carpings of an elderly lawyer who has won a bad eminence for himself by living for twenty years in Calcutta. By the way, I had Ancram’s apologies to deliver to the Maharajah. If he had known he would perhaps have entrusted me with more important ones.” Doyle made this speech in general compensation, to any one who wanted it, for being near her—with her. If he expected blushing confusion he failed to find it.
“He didn’t know,” she said indifferently; “and if he had——Oh, there are the wrestlers.” She looked at them for a moment with disfavour. “Do you like them? I think they are like performing animals.”
The men separated for a moment and rubbed their shining brown bodies with earth. Somewhere near the gate the Maharajah’s band struck up “God Save the Queen,” four prancing pennons appeared over the tops of the bushes, and with one accord the crowd moved off in that direction. A moment later His Highness was doubling up in appreciation of His Excellency’s condescension in arriving. His Excellency himself was surrounded ten feet deep by his awe-struck and delighted fellow-guests, and the wrestlers, bereft of an audience, sat down and spat.