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were all so evidently seeing it. Linda, for instance, had seen it clearly but then she had been successfully pursuing love.
    “What I do enjoy,” I said, truthfully, “is the dressing up.”
    “Oh, so do I! Do you think about dresses and hats all the time, even in church? I do, too. Heavenly tweed, Fanny, I noticed it at once.”
    “Only it’s bagging,” I said.
    “They always bag, except on very smart little thin women, like Veronica. Are you pleased to be back in this room? It’s the one you used to have, do you remember?”
    Of course I remembered. It always had my name in full “The Hon ble Frances Logan” written in a careful copperplate on a card on the door, even when I was so small that I came with my nanny, and this had greatly impressed and pleased me as a child.
    “Is this what you’re going to wear to-night?” Polly went up to the huge red four-poster where my dress was laid out.
    “How lovely—green velvet and silver. I call that a dream, so soft and delicious, too.” She rubbed a fold of the skirt against her cheek. “Mine’s silver lamé. It smells like a bird cage when it gets hot, but I do love it. Aren’t you thankful evening skirts are long again? But I want to hear more about what coming out is like in England.”
    “Dances,” I said, “girls’ luncheon parties, tennis, if you can, dinner parties to go to, plays, Ascot, being presented. Oh, I don’t know, I expect you can just about imagine.”
    “And all going on like the people downstairs?”
    “Chattering all the time? Well, but the downstairs people are old, Polly, coming out is with people of one’s own age, you see.”
    “They don’t think they’re old a bit,” she said, laughing.
    “Well,” I said, “all the same, they are.”
    “I don’t see them as so old myself, but I expect that’s because they seem young beside Mummy and Daddy. Just think of it, Fanny, your mother wasn’t born when Mummy married, and Mrs. Warbeck was only just old enough to be her bridesmaid. Mummy was saying so before you came. No, but what I really want to know about coming out here is, what about love? Are they all always having love affairs the whole time? Is it their one and only topic of conversation?”
    I was obliged to admit that this was the case.
    “Oh, bother. I felt sure, really, you would say that. It was so in India, of course, but I thought perhaps in a cold climate …! Anyway, don’t tell Mummy if she asks you. Pretend that English debutantes don’t bother about love. She is in a perfect fit because I never fall in love with people; she teases me about it all the time. But it isn’t any good, because if you don’t you don’t. I should have thought, at my age, it’s natural not to.”
    I looked at her in surprise, it seemed to me highly unnatural, though I could well understand not wanting to talk about such things to the grown-ups, and specially not to Lady Montdore if she happened to be one’s mother. But a new idea struck me.
    “In India,” I said, “could you have fallen in love?” Polly laughed.
    “Fanny darling, what do you mean? Of course I could have. Why not? I just didn’t happen to, you see.”
    “White people?”
    “White or black,” she said, teasingly.
    “Fall in love with blacks?” What would Uncle Matthew say?
    “People do, like anything. You don’t understand about Rajahs, I see, but some of them are awfully attractive. I had a friend there who nearly died of love for one. And I’ll tell you something, Fanny. I honestly believe Mamma would rather I fell in love with an Indian than not at all. Of course there would have been a fearful row, and I should have been sent straight home, but even so she would have thought it quite a good thing. What she minds so muchis the not at all. I bet you anything she’s only asked this Frenchman to stay because she thinks no woman can resist him. They could think of nothing else in Delhi. I wasn’t there at the time, I was in the hills with Boy and