“Yes. And then we’ll be comfortable. He can leave all the doors and windows open, you know, so that you can take a severe cold if you want to. Although this is a country governed by a merciless despotism we don’t compel people to keep well if they’d rather not.”
“I can’t imagine anybody suffering from the cold in Calcutta!” Helen declared. “Why, to-day the thermometer stood at eighty-three!”
“Oh,” said Mr. Sayter, “how I envy you.—What! no Roman punch! You are still warm, you still believe in the thermometer, you still find the baboo picturesque—I know you do! Thank Heaven, I continue to like Roman punch—I retain that innocent taste. But I’ve been cold,” said Mr. Sayter, rubbing his hand, with a shiver, “for years. For years I’ve had no faith in the thermometer. For years I’ve been compelled to separate the oil from the less virtuous principles in the baboo. It’s very sad, Mrs. Browne, but you’ll come to it.”
“I say, Sayter,” remarked young Browne, who was singularly without respect of persons, considering that he lived in Calcutta, “I can’t have you frightening my wife about what she’ll come to in Calcutta. I don’t want her to develop nervous moral apprehensions—based on what you’ve come to!”
Mr. Sayter’s chin sank into his necktie in official deprecation of this liberty on the part of a junior, and a mercantile one, but he allowed himself to find it humorous, and chuckled, if the word does not express too vulgar a demonstration. He leaned back and fingered his empty glass.
“Mrs. Browne,” he said deliberately and engagingly, “will come to nothing that is not entirely charming.” And he smiled at Helen in a way which said, “There, I can’t do better than that.” As a matter of fact he could, and Helen, as she blushed, was blissfully unaware that this was the kind of compliment Mr. Sayter offered, though not invidiously, to the wives of mercantile juniors.
“Moral apprehensions,” repeated Mr. Sayter slowly.—“No! I’ve had you for ten years,”—he apostrophized the kitmutgar—“you’ve grown grey in my service and fat on my income, and you don’t know yet that I never take anything with a hole in it like that—and pink vegetables inside the hole! Mrs. Browne, I’m glad you refrained. That’s the single thing Calcutta dinners teach—the one great lesson of abstinence! I was very clever and learned it early—and you see how many of them I must have survived. But talking of moral apprehensions, I know you’re disappointed in one thing.”
“No,” said Helen, promptly; “I like everything.”
“Then you haven’t anticipated us properly—you haven’t heard about us. You ought to be very much disappointed in our flagrant respectability.”
“But I like respectability,” Helen replied, with honesty.