The English at Home, Noreen had ever regarded with a mental reservation, or two; and with those telling, divining eyes which are not rarely filled with Irish light. She had repressed and even tried to root out an instinctive animus for certain monuments and institutions large in British life; she tried constantly to shut her eyes to that quarry of self-infatuation, perdition deep, from which these monuments and institutions were carved. She came to triumph over her critical impulses at home, partly because her incisive barbs were dulled by constant contact and repetition--but India again after the few vital years of growth!... Londoners might forget themselves for an hour or two a day on the Thames. They allowed it to be taken for granted an hour or two a day at Home that they were English. In India, they were more English than the English. It must not be forgotten that Noreen Cardinegh’s mind was the arena of interminable rebellion against the banishment of Routledge. All Englishmen of rank arrayed themselves in contrast to him. She knew that this was wrong, useless; that the energy which spent itself in contrasting to the disfavor of the English, reacted with a hurt to her own finest nature, but she could not help it now. As a daughter of Jerry Cardinegh, she could not be free from something of his passion; moreover, body and brain, she was spent in his service. There were vast areas of unhealed tissue within her--the agony of a daughter of strong devotion, and the agony of a woman whose romance is mined and countermined. So it was a weary and supersensitive nature that caught its new series of impressions of Anglo-Indian life--the life of pegs and chits; men moving in a circle like those lost in the woods; men speaking of their livers as of members of the family; hot, heavy dinners; the religious, life-and-death ceremony of eating and drinking; the arrogant assumption of superiority over the native, and each separate foreigner a cyst of the great British drain! Such were the men of the Indian ports to whom the name of Cosmo Routledge was as black magic. It all came back to her like an ugly dream, and it is not strange that she returned speedily to her ships to cleanse herself from her thoughts in the prophylactic sea-winds.