Quita, however, was in a better case than many wives so circumstanced; in that her art was no mere distraction for spare hours, but a living reality; though, unhappily, a capricious one. And now when she would have returned to it in earnest after months of philandering with brush and pencil, it stood aloof, unmanageable as Eldred himself! She was too genuinely an artist to attempt the completion of an imaginative picture against the stream; and for fresh work, fresh mental stimulus was needed. This was not readily to be found in the everyday happenings--the riding, tennis, and gatherings at the Club Gardens--that made up the cold-weather life at Dera Ishmael; and she had little taste for small social or domestic amenities, in themselves. The call of the wild was in her blood. One might as well hope to domesticate a sea-gull as a woman of this type. She managed her household on broad lines, ignoring minor details, and Zyarulla, to his secret relief, found himself still the lynx-eyed custodian of the Sahib's _Izzat_[1] in houses and compound, still the controller of his petty cash. Quita received his monthly account--plus a minute percentage on each item--in perfect good faith. His visions of possible dismissal evaporated. He heartily commended his master's choice of a wife; and, in moments of expansion over the evening hookah, confided to the Khansamah--a friend and ally in the matter of accounts--his conviction that Mem Sahibs who made pictures were of a different _jat_ to those who played tennis, harried their ayahs, and rode rough-shod over the sensibilities of honest bearers like himself! [Transcriber's note: The "a" in "_jat_" is an a-macron, Unicode U+0101.] And, in truth, the Bohemian and cosmopolitan elements in Quita made her airily contemptuous of trifles, of the petty point of view, the 'local' attitude of mind often found in isolated Indian stations, more especially among the women. And setting aside Honor and Frank, the half-dozen officers' wives belonging to the Infantry Regiments were for the most part colourless average types of femininity such as Quita was something too ready to despise.