She looked at it all as she rolled by with a little tender smile of reconnaissance. The old fascination never failed her; the people and their doings never became common facts. Nevertheless she was very tired. The crowd seethed along in the full glare of the afternoon, hawking, disputing, gesticulating. The burden of their talk—the naked coolies, the shrill-jabbering women with loads of bricks upon their heads, the sleek baboos in those European shirts the nether hem of which no canon of propriety has ever taught them to confine—the burden of their talk reached her where she sat, and it was all of _paisa_[A] and _rupia_, the eternal dominant note of the bazar. She closed her eyes and tried to put herself into relation with a life bounded by the rim of a copper coin. She was certainly very tired. When she looked again a woman stooped over one of the city standpipes and made a cup with her hand and gave her little son to drink. He was a very beautiful little son, with a string of blue beads round his neck and a silver anklet on each of his fat brown legs, and as he caught her hand with his baby fingers the mother smiled over him in her pride. ----- Footnote A: Halfpence. ----- Judith Church suddenly leaned back among her cushions very close to tears. “It would have been better,” she said to herself—“so much better,” as she opened her eyes widely and tried to think about something else. There was her weekly dinner-party of forty that night, and she was to go down with the Bishop. Oh, well! that was better than Sir Peter Bloomsbury. She hoped Captain Thrush had not forgotten to ask some people who could sing—and _not_ Miss Nellie Vansittart. She smiled a little as she thought how Captain Thrush had made Nellie Vansittart’s pretty voice an excuse for asking her and her people twice already this month. She must see that Captain Thrush was not on duty the afternoon of Mrs. Vansittart’s _musicale_. She felt indulgent towards Captain Thrush and Nellie Vansittart; she give that young lady plenary absolution for the monopoly of her lieutenant on the Belvedere Thursdays; she thought of them by their Christian names. Then to-morrow—to-morrow she opened the _café chantant_ for the Sailors’ Home, and they dined at the Fort with the General. On Wednesday there was the Eurasian Female Orphans’ prize-giving, and the dance on board the _Boetia_. On Friday a “Lady Dufferin” meeting—or was it the Dhurrumtollah Self-Help Society, or the Sisters’ Mission?—she must look it up in her book. And, sandwiched in somewhere, she knew there was a German bacteriologist and a lecture on astronomy. She put up both her slender hands in her black gloves and yawned; remembering at the same time that it was ten days since she had seen Lewis Ancram. Her responsibilities, when he mocked at them with her, seemed light and amusing. He gave her strength and stimulus: she was very frank with herself in confessing how much she depended upon him.