They had said good-bye to her and God bless you, all of them, but they evidently meant to sing the ship out of port.  Lindsay sat down beside the victim of the demonstration and quietly took her hand.  There was a consciousness newly guilty in his discomfort, which he owed perhaps to a ghost of futility that seemed to pace up and down before him, between the ranks of the steamer-chairs.  Nevertheless as she presently turned a calmed face to him with her pale apology he had the sensation of a rebound toward the ideal that had finally perished in the spotted muslin, and when a little later he watched the long backward trail of smoke as the steamer moved down the clear morning river, he reflected that it was a satisfaction to have prevailed.

The Sutlej had gone far on her tranquil course by the evening of a dinner in Middleton Street, at which the guests, it was understood, were to proceed later to a party given at Government House by his Excellency the Viceroy.  Alicia, when she included Duff in her invitations, felt an assurance that the steamer must by that time have reached Aden, and rose almost with buoyancy to the illusion you can make if you like, with the geographical mile.  She could hardly have left him out in any case—­he could almost have demanded an explanation—­since it was one of those parties which she gave every now and then, undiscouraged, with the focus of Hilda Howe.  It had to be every now and then, because Calcutta society was so little adapted to appreciate meeting talented actresses—­there were so many people whom Alicia had to consider as to whether they would “mind.”  Hilda marvelled at the sanguine persistence of Miss Livingstone’s efforts in this direction, the results were so fragmentary, so dislocated and indecisive, but she also rejoiced.  She took life, as may have appeared, at a broad and generous level, it quite comprehended the salient points of a Calcutta dinner-party; and it was seldom that she failed, metaphorically speaking, to carry away a bone from the feast.  If you found this reprehensible she would have told you she had observed they do it in Japan, where manners are the best in the world.

Doubtless Hilda would have dwelt longer upon such a dinner-party than I, with no consolatory bone to gnaw in private, find myself inclined to do.  To me it is depressing and a little cruel to be compelled to betray the inadequacy of the personal element at Alicia’s banquets, especially in connection with the conspicuous excellence of the cooking.  A poverty of cuisine would have provoked no contrast, and one irony the less would have been offered up to the gods that season.  The limitations of her resources were, of course, arbitrary, that is plain in the fact that she asked such a person as the Head of the Department of Education, with no better reason than that he had laid almost the whole of Shelley under critical notes for the benefit of Calcutta University.  There was also a civilian who had written a few years