She did her best to make it an honest conviction. I offered her a recent success not crowned by the Academy, and she put it down on the table. ‘By and by,’ she said. ‘At present I am reading Pascal and Bossuet.’ Well, she was reading Pascal and Bossuet. She grieved aloud that most of our activities in India were so indomitably youthful, owing to the accident that most of us were always so young. ‘There is no dignified distraction in this country,’ she complained, ‘for respectable ladies nearing forty.’ She seemed to like to make these declarations in the presence of Somers Chichele, who would look at her with a little queer smile--a bad translation, I imagine, of what he felt. She gave herself so generously to her seniors that somebody said Mrs. Harbottle’s girdle was hung with brass hats. It seems flippant to add that her complexion was as honest as the day, but the fact is that the year before Judy had felt compelled, like the rest of us, to repair just a little the ravages of the climate. If she had never done it one would not have looked twice at the absurdity when she said of the powder-puff in the dressing-room, ‘I have raised that thing to the level of an immorality,’ and sailed in to dance with an uncompromising expression and a face uncompromised. I have not spoken of her beauty; for one thing it was not always there, and there were people who would deny it altogether, or whose considered comment was, ‘I wouldn’t call her plain.’ They, of course, were people in whom she declined to be interested, but even for those of us who could evoke some demonstration of her vivid self her face would not always light in correspondence. When it did there was none that I liked better to look at; and I envied Somers Chichele his way to make it the pale, shining thing that would hold him lifted, in return, for hours together, with I know not what mystic power of a moon upon the tide. And he? Oh, he was dark and delicate, by nature simple, sincere, delightfully intelligent. His common title to charm was the rather sweet seriousness that rested on his upper lip, and a certain winning gratification in his attention; but he had a subtler one in his eyes, which must be always seeking and smiling over what they found; those eyes of perpetual inquiry for the exquisite which ask so little help to create it. A personality to button up in a uniform, good heavens! As I begin to think of them together I remember how the maternal note appeared in her talk about him. ‘His youth is pathetic,’ she told me, ‘but there is nothing that he does not understand.’