Page:An American Girl in India.djvu/236

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226
AN AMERICAN GIRL IN INDIA

size of him. He was not just born to run the Delhi Durbar. But he showed us the list of expected visitors in that camp. Berengaria read it with great awe. That list contained some of the smartest names in the English peerage, and looked real imposing to any commoner with ambitions that way.

That night at dinner I saw the whole of our camp collected together for the first time. Then I met Sir Henry and Lady Mullins. Sir Henry was a short little man with a parchment face and twinkling grey eyes. He was quite wonderfully alert considering he had done thirty-five years' service. Lady Mullins was tall and big, and just made to be a great official's wife. You could see straight away that she liked to move around and boss things, and that she would do it pleasantly when she could, but you mustn't get in the way. She was rather like Berengaria. There is no doubt that Berengaria would make an excellent Lieutenant-Governor's wife.

Now I can't say that that camp was just exactly lovely. 'It's dull,' Berengaria declared in her outspoken way later on, 'very dull, and it's a great consolation that it isn't costing us a penny.' You see, the young element was rather lacking. In India you don't become a very important personage until you get on in life—not important enough, I mean, to be asked up as a government guest to a state thing like the Delhi Durbar. Unless, of course, you happen to be an A.D.C., when you can do and expect and get anything. I had heard so