didn't wax his moustache was like eating an egg without salt'), through the savage man-exploiting Mrs. Reiver, up to Mrs. Hawksbee, 'the most wonderful woman in India,'—every one of them he treats with a loving, patient, and elaborate detail. Some of them are not worth it, 'the most wonderful woman in India' among them (he dedicates Plain Tales from the Hills, with a mild fatuity, 'to the wittiest woman in India,' who must run that terrible Mrs. Hawksbee close); but others are drawn with the hand of a master, and are among his most living creations. The same is to be said of many of the men.
Here, then, we have at last the Anglo-Indian 'society' life of to-day, and we see it from every side. Duty and red-tape tempered by picnics and adultery—it is a singular spectacle. But we are to ascribe much, very much, to the climate. Simla holds 'the only existence in this desolate land worth the living.' For the rest, it is six months purgatory and six months hell. 'One of the many curses of our life in India is the want of atmosphere in the painter's sense. There are no half-tints worth noticing. Men stand out all crude and raw, with nothing to tone them down, and nothing to scale them against.' For instance, we speak of 'all the pleasures of a quiet English wooing, quite different
