“And I don’t know that he doesn’t invent the little Peckles. To hear him groan over their expenses you’d think there was a new one every year, and you know that’s manifestly—”
“George!”
“I was going to say improbable. But I dare say there are a lot of ’em. Peckle goes home once in three or four years and refreshes his memory as to number and size. After that he always has a fit of economy and puts down a horse or two.”
“Poor things!” said Helen, pensively, “an old bachelor and two grass widowers! How wretched their lives must be! Why, if I had to go home for my health, dear, I can’t imagine what would become of you!”
“Y—yes! No, indeed, darling! But you sha’n’t go!” An interruption foolish but inevitable. “As to those old fellows—well, you’ll see. It’s rather a swagger chummery, very decent men,” young Browne went on, “and therefore, my dear,” with mock resignation, “they’ll give us all sorts of unholy indigestibles to eat, and your husband will have liver of the most frightful description for a week.”
“Liver,” however, very seldom ensues in the early days of matrimony, and Helen, unacquainted with this domestic bane, laughed it to scorn. It was her unconscious belief that the idylls of the Brownes could not suffer from such a commonplace.
MR. SAYTER.
Mr. Sayter wore a civil tag of considerable size; the other two men were brokers. Mr. Sayter’s tag was not offensively conspicuous, was not in fact to be seen at all unless one took the trouble to observe it by inference. I mean that a critical estimate of Mr. Sayter’s manner would discover the tag; it might be detected behind his attitude and his aphorisms and the free way in which he lifted his voice upon all things. Perhaps it was only observable in the course of time and the progress of one’s acquaintance with tagography. At first sight Mr. Sayter was a little grey gentleman with a look of shrinking modesty and a pair of very bright eyes. Indeed Mr. Sayter bore himself almost with humility, his shoulders had a very unaggressive slope, and he had a way of casting down his eyes as he talked to you which did not suggest a lofty spirit. Custom, however, proved Mr. Sayter’s modesty to be rather like that of the fretful porcupine, his humility to take amused superior standpoints of opinion, and his eyes to be cast down in search of clever jests that were just the least bit wicked. All of which, in Anglo-India, subtly denotes the tag. The untagged or the undertagged are much more careful how they behave.
Mr. Sayter came down to meet them in the hall and give Mrs. Browne his arm up stairs, as is the custom in this place. Helen observed that the wall was very white and high and undecorated, that the floor was tiled with blocks of marble, and that the stairs were of broad polished mahogany. In her host she saw only the unobtrusive Mr. Sayter with a reassuring smile of characteristic sweetness anxiously getting out of the way of her train. Young Browne, temporarily abandoned, followed them up discreetly, and at the top Mrs. Browne was introduced to a Calcutta dinner-party waiting for a Calcutta dinner.