“Use? Of course you will. You’ll be driven to death, but if Mrs. Walter Luff takes you up, you won’t mind that! Besides,” said Mrs. Macdonald with an effect of awakened conscience, “the East Indian Self-Helps do a lot of good. You’re interested in the East Indians, aren’t you—the Eurasians?”
“I don’t know them when I see them,” said Helen. “I always confuse them with the Jews and the Greeks.”
“Oh, well, you soon will. As a rule they’re awfully poor, you know, and give us a lot of trouble in Calcutta. Dear me!” Mrs. Macdonald ejaculated, looking round, “how pretty you are! But if I were you I’d have a Mirzapore rug for the middle of the floor; it makes the room so much richer, you know—shows up everything. And you ought to get two or three good engravings—there are some lovely new French things at Thacker’s—only fifty rupees each. Go and see them. But I must be off,” said this sprightly lady, and Helen was presently again alone, with a delicate disappearing odour of jessamine and her reflections.
I dropped in that morning too, after all the rest; but it is not essential to the progress of this narrative that you should be allowed to gather from my conversation the sort of person that I am.
CHAPTER XI.
IT was clearly impossible to attend Her Excellency’s Drawing-Room in a tum-tum. The Brownes discussed it with fulness and precision at some length. Most people resident in Calcutta would have arrived at this conclusion more rapidly; but as young Browne said, he had never taken a wife to a Drawing-Room before, and a fellow always went to the levées in his tum-tum.
“It’s that awful silk tail of yours that’s the difficulty, dear,” said he. “It might get wound up in the wheels, or Lord knows what. Couldn’t you take it in a parcel and put it on when you get there?”
I can safely leave Helen’s response to the imagination of all femininity.
“Then,” said young Browne, “it must be a ticca,” and Helen sighed compliance, for she hated ticcas.