Eva watched the slow and gradual ruin of her house, her furniture, her clothes. Day by day, inexorably, something was spoilt, something rotted away, something was covered with mildew or rust. And none of the æsthetic philosophy with which she had at first taught herself to love India, to appreciate the good in India, to seek in India for external plastic beauty and inward beauty of soul, was able to withstand the streaming water, the cracking of her furniture, the staining of her frocks and gloves, the damp, mildew and rust that wrecked the exquisite environment which she had designed and created all around her, as a comfort, to console her for living in India. All her logic, all her feeling of making the best of things, of finding something attractive and beautiful after all in the land of all-prevailing nature and of people eager for money and position, all this failed her and came to naught, now that she was every moment irritated and incensed as a housewife, as an elegant woman, an artistic woman. No, it was impossible in India to surround one's self with taste and exquisiteness. She had been here for only two years and she was still able to make a certain fight for her western culture; but nevertheless she was now already better able than in the first days after her arrival to understand the laisser-aller of the men, after their hard work, and of the women, in their housekeeping. True, the servants with their soundless movements, working with gentle hands, willing, never impertinent, were to her thinking far superior to the noisy, pounding maids in Holland; but nevertheless she felt in all her household an eastern antagonism to her western ideas. It was always a struggle not to surrender to that laisser-aller, to the running to waste of the over-large grounds, invariably hung at the back with the dirty washing of the servants and strewn with nibbled mangoes; to the gradual spoiling and fading of the paint of the house, which was also too large, too open, too much exposed to wind and weather to be cared for with Dutch cleanliness; to the habit of sitting and rocking, undressed, in sarong and kabaai, with one's bare feet in slippers, because it was really too hot, too sultry to dress one's self in a frock or tea-gown, which only became soaked in perspiration. It was for her sake that her husband always dressed for dinner, in a black jacket and stand-up collar; but, when she saw his tired face, with that more and more fixed, overtired office expression above that stand-up collar, she herself begged him not to trouble to dress next time after his second bath and allowed him to dine in a white jacket, or even in pyjamas. She thought it terrible, thought it unspeakably dreadful; it shocked all her ideas of correctness; but really he was too tired and it was too sultry and oppressive for her to expect anything more from him. And she, after only two years in India, understood more and more easily that laisser-aller--in dress, in