“Not at all,” I said out of my experience, “in America there is as yet great uniformity of peculiarity,” but this was going very far afield on a warm day, and we left the matter there.
“I don’t think I like individuality in young men,” remarked Delia, thoughtfully, “In young men it seems a liberty, almost an impertinence.”
I can imagine the normal attitude of young men toward Delia being quite satisfying, but I let her go on.
“I have just met an A.D.C. riding up the Mall smoking a pipe,” she continued. “He took off his hat to me like a bandit.” Now Simla’s traditions of behaviour are very strict and the choicest of them are locked up in the tenue of an aide-de-camp. “It was quite a shock,” said Delia.
“All things are possible in nature, but some are rare,” I told her. “It is doubtless a remote effect of all this Irregular Horse in South Africa. You may live to boast that you have seen an aide-de-camp ride up the Mall at Simla smoking a common clay.”
“It wasn’t a common clay,” she corrected me.
“But it will be when you boast of it,” I assured her. “Come and see my home for decayed gentlewomen.”
“What do you mean?” she cried, and would have buffeted me; but I led her with circumstance to the edge of the shelf, over which appeared lower down on the khud-side, another small projection which tried to be a shelf and couldn’t, but was still flat enough for purposes. There were sitting, in respectable retirement, all the venerable roses that had outlived delight, the common kinds and those that had grown little worth in the service of the summer.
“They had to come out,” I explained, “and I couldn’t find it in my heart to throw them on the ash-heap.”
“With all their modest roots exposed,” put in Delia. “Cruel it would have been.”