For ten days the two girls heard nothing from the Pall Mall Theater. It was possible, if not probable, that they might not hear at all. Meanwhile Maggy went about with Alexandra looking for an engagement in some other direction. It was a matter of urgency to both of them to get something to do. Maggy had been out of an engagement for two months. She was in Mrs. Bell’s debt, and she owed money to a doctor. Alexandra was little better off. As the orphaned daughter of an officer she had a pension of £40 a year so long as she remained unmarried. But with the expense she had been put to in coming to town and in spite of the strictest economy it was not enough to live on. She could not help being anxious about the future; more so than Maggy. Maggy, though she chafed at them, was accustomed to bad times: Alexandra had never struck them before. Hardly had she got over the illusion of imagining that a small part in a London theater was obtainable than she found herself in no request even for the chorus. It was terribly disappointing. They were forever haunting stage-doors and the crowded waiting rooms of theatrical agencies. For hours every day they wandered about the Strand and its environs. But for the prospect of sheer want confronting them they would have been quite happy. The bond that united them was based on mutual respect as well as affection. Disappointment and privation only cemented it. In these days when the stale breakfast egg was a comestible to be shared, when anything better than canned food became a luxury, their friendship remained free from any of the pettinesses which generally characterize the intimacy of people living under conditions of hardship. The stoicism of a family of soldiers supported Alexandra. She had the pride of race that refuses to surrender to misfortune. Her grit, astonishing in one so delicately reared, surprised Maggy. She began to look up to Alexandra as a being of a superior world in which the virtues, being Anglo-Indian, were of a particularly high order. She had a very nebulous conception of the meaning of the term. Just as Alexandra found it absorbing to listen to Maggy’s stage talk, even though it was humorously misogynistic, so nothing pleased Maggy so much as to listen to Alexandra’s narration of life in an Indian military station. It sounded to her like a history of the high gods: a medley of color, warmth and ease, good living and brass bands. She loved to hear of parades and polo, of the troops of servants, the gymkhanas and dances, all the social amusements and advantages of the sahib caste. From habit, Alexandra would use native words when talking of these things, and Maggy’s unaccustomed brain never quite differentiated between syce, hazari, maidan, ayah, chit, durzi, kitmagar, butti, tikka-gari and such-like terms in common use with Anglo-Indians. But they impressed her immensely.