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She began at once to pick her way through the crowd, and he followed her, with not even rime to
thank the pwe-people for their trouble. The Burmans made way with a sulky air. How like these
English people, to upset everything by sending for the best dancer and then go away almost before she
had started! There was a fearful row as soon as Flory and Elizabeth had gone, the pwe-girl refusing to
go on with her dance and the authence demanding that she should continue. However, peace was
restored when two clowns hurried onto the stage and began letting off crackers and making obscene
jokes.
Flory followed the girl abjectly up the road. She was walking quickly, her head turned away, and
for some moments she would not speak. What a thing to happen, when they had been getting on so
well together! He kept trying to apologise.
‘I’m so sorry! I’d no idea you’d mind–’
‘It’s nothing. What is there to be sorry about? I only said it was time to go back, that’s all.’
‘I ought to have thought. One gets not to notice that kind of thing in this country. These people’s
sense of decency isn’t the same as ours–it’s stricter in some ways–but ——’
‘It’s not that! It’s not that!’ she exclaimed quite angrily.
He saw that he was only making it worse. They walked on in silence, he behind. He was
miserable. What a bloody, fool he had been! And yet all the while he had no inkling of the real reason
why she was angry with him. It was not the pwe-girl’s behaviour, in itself, that had offended her; it
had only brought things to a head. But the whole expedition–the very notion of wanting to rub
shoulders with all those smelly natives–had impressed her badly. She was perfectly certain that that
was not how white men ought to behave. And that extraordinary rambling speech that he had begun,
with all those long words–almost, she thought bitterly, as though he were quoting poetry! It was how
those beastly artists that you met sometimes in Paris used to talk. She had thought him a manly man till
this evening. Then her mind went back to the morning’s adventure, and how he had faced the buffalo
barehanded, and some of her anger evaporated. By the time they reached the Club gate she felt
inclined to forgive him. Flory had by now plucked up courage to speak again. He stopped, and she
stopped too, in a patch where the boughs let through some starlight and he could see her face dimly.
‘I say. I say, I do hope you’re not really angry about this?’
‘No, of course I’m not. I told you I wasn’t.’
‘I oughtn’t to have taken you there. Please forgive me.——Do you know, I don’t think I’d tell the
others where you’ve been. Perhaps it would be better to say you’ve just been out for a stroll, out in
the garden–something like that. They might think it queer, a white girl going to a pwe. I don’t think I’d
tell them.’
‘Oh, of course I won’t!’ she agreed with a warmness that surprised him. After that he knew that he
was forgiven. But what it was that he was forgiven, he had not yet grasped.
They went into me Club separately, by tacit consent. The expedition had been a failure, decidedly.
There was a gala air about the Club lounge tonight. The entire European community were waiting to
greet Elizabeth, and the butler and the six chokras, in their best starched white suits, were drawn up
on either side of the door, smiling and salaaming. When the Europeans had finished their greetings the
buder came forward with a vast garland of flowers that the servants had prepared for the ‘missie-