Ida picked up her hat and parasol and said: 

“Now I’ll leave you to get straight, darling child, and come back to you later on.”

She looked into the glass again and went on: 

“It’s so nice to have you here.  A woman alone is rather out of it, especially if she comes from the other side of India and doesn’t know Calcutta people.  Now it’ll be all right when there are two of us.  The cats can’t say horrid things about me and Bertie—­though it’s only the old frumps that can’t get a man who do.  I am glad you’ve come.  We’ll have such fun.”

* * * * *

Captain Bain, a dapper little man, designed by Nature to be the “tame cat” of some married woman, was punctual when the time came to take the two ladies to the Amusement Club.  Noreen had very dubiously donned her smartest frock which, having just been taken out of a trunk after a long journey, seemed very crushed, creased, and dowdy compared with the freshness and daintiness of Ida’s toilette. Men as a rule understand nothing of the agonies endured by a woman who must face the unfriendly stares of other women in a gown that she feels will invite pitiless criticism.

But for the moment the girl forgot her worries as they turned out of the hotel gate and reached the Chaurasta, the meeting of the “four-ways,” nearly as busy a cross-roads as (and infinitely more beautiful than) Carfax at Oxford or the Quattro Canti in Palermo.  To the east the hill of Jalapahar towered a thousand feet above Darjeeling, crowned with bungalows and barracks.  To the north the ground fell as sharply; and a thousand feet below Darjeeling lay Lebong, set out on a flattened hilltop.  On three sides of this military suburb the hill sloped steeply to the valleys below.  But beyond them, tumbled mass upon mass, rose the great mountains barring the way to Sikkim and Tibet, towering to the clouds that hid the white summits of the Eternal Snows.

Bain walked his pony beside Noreen’s chair and named the various points of the scenery around them.  Then, when Noreen had inscribed her name in the Visitors’ Book at Government House, they entered the Amusement Club.

Noreen was overcome with shyness at finding herself, after her months of isolation, among scores of white folk, all strangers to her.  Ida unconcernedly led the way into the large hall which was used as a roller-skating rink, along one side of which were set out dozens of little tables around which sat ladies in smart frocks that made the girl more painfully conscious of what she considered to be the deficiencies of her own costume.  She saw one or two of the women that had travelled up in the train that day stare at her and then lean forward and make some remark about her to their companions at the table.  She was profoundly thankful when the ordeal was over and, in Ida’s wake, she had got out of the rink.  Conscious only of the critical glances of her own sex, she was not aware of the admiring looks cast at her by many men in the groups around the tables.