'Met him yesterday for the first time,' said Cairns, 'and really I can't say I want to know. Might be awkward. Must be in the stores or something. Looks to me like a cross between a mute and a parson. Bit of a worm, anyhow.'
'Oh, he didn't hurt my feelings,' remarked Victoria; 'but some men never know what women have got on.' Cairns looked her over approvingly. Shoddy-looking mourning. Durzee made of course. But, Lord, what hands and eyes.
'I daresay not,' he said drily. 'I wish he'd keep away though. Let's walk up.'
He took a stride or two away from Alastair. Victoria followed him. She was rather taken with his rough simplicity, the comfort of his apparent obtuseness. So like an uncle, she thought.
'Well, Mrs Fulton,' said Cairns, 'I suppose you're glad to be here, as usual.'
'As usual?'
'Yes, as usual; people are always glad to be on board. If they're going home, they're going home and if they're going out they're thinking that it's going to be full pay instead of half.'
'It hadn't struck me like that,' said Victoria with a smile, 'though I suppose I am glad to go home.'
'Funny,' said the Major, 'I never found a country like India to make people want to come to it and to make them want to get out of it when they were there. We had a sub once. You should have heard him on the dead cities. Somewhere south east of Hyderabad, he said. And native jewellery, and fakirism, and all that. He's got a liver now and the last I heard of him was that he put his shoulder out at polo.'
Victoria looked out over the immense oily greenness of the water. Far away on the skyline a twirling wreath of smoke showed that some tramp steamer was passing them unseen. The world was between them; they were crawling on one side of the ball and the tramp on the other, like flies on an orange. Was that tramp, Bombay bound, carrying more than a cargo of rolling stock? Perhaps the mate had forgotten his B.S.A. fittings and was brooding, he too, over the dead cities, somewhere south-east of Hyderabad.