“Try it,” said I.
“And are you better?”
“I think,” I replied, “that I have possibly gained a little weight. But I might as well admit it cheerfully, they won’t take my word against any pair of scales.”
“That was an excellent prescription I sent you in October,” Thalia continued reproachfully. “You haven’t given it up?”
“It has given me up,” I responded promptly, “after the first three weeks it declined to have anything whatever to say to me. And besides, it had to be taken in decreasing doses. Now if a thing is really calculated to do you good it should be taken in increasing doses. That is why I begin to have some little confidence in this out-of-doors business. Every day I feel equal to a little more of it.”
“Well,” said Thalia, “Mrs. Lyric told me that it had made another woman of her. And Colonel Lyric commands the 10th Pink Hussars.”
Thalia knows it annoys me to be told about a woman, with any sort of significance, what position her husband occupies in the world, and that is the reason she does it. I do not say that it has no weight as a contributory fact in a general description, but I do say that an improper amount of importance is usually attached to it. You ask what kind of a person Mrs. Thom is, and you are told, “Oh, Mr. Thom is Chief Secretary in the Department of Thuggi and Dacoity,” being expected without further ado to dispose yourself to love her if she will let you. One is always inclined to say “But she may be very nice in spite of that,” and one only refrains because one knows how scandal grows in Simla. And there are people in these parts, I assure you, who would run to take a prescription because it had made another woman of the wife of the colonel commanding the 10th Pink Hussars, no matter what kind of a woman she had been before; but I was not going to gratify Thalia by letting her see that I knew it.
“At all events,” I said calmly, “it had to be taken in decreasing doses and naturally it came to an end. Are you settled in?”
“I have a roof to cover me,” said Thalia sententiously, “and for that,” she added looking round, “I didn’t know how thankful I was. But I am undergoing repairs. They are putting mud into the cracks of my dwelling, paperhangers are impending, and this morning arrived three whitewashers. I wanted to be done with it at once, so I sent for three. I told them I was in a hurry. In one breath, they said, it should be done, and sat down in the verandah to make their brushes. It’s a fact. Of split bamboo. You can not hustle the East. But I found I had to come away.”
“How foolish it all seems!” I sighed with an eye upon the farther hills. “Shouldn’t you like to see my pansies?”