If I had been given anything like reasonable time I might have made a fight for it, but four weeks--it took a month each way in those days--was too absurdly little; I could do nothing. But I would not stay at mamma’s. It was more than I would ask of myself, that daily disappointment under the mask of gratified discovery, for long. I spent an approving, unnatural week, in my farcical character, bridling my resentment and hiding my mortification with pretty phrases; and then I went up to town and drowned my sorrows in the summer sales. I took John with me. I may have been Cecily’s mother in theory, but I was John’s wife in fact. We went back to the frontier, and the regiment saw a lot of service. That meant medals and fun for my husband, but economy and anxiety for me, though I managed to be allowed as close to the firing line as any woman. Once the Colonel’s wife and I, sitting in Fort Samila, actually heard the rifles of a punitive expedition cracking on the other side of the river--that was a bad moment. My man came in after fifteen hours’ fighting, and went sound asleep, sitting before his food with his knife and fork in his hands. But service makes heavy demands besides those on your wife’s nerves. We had saved two thousand rupees, I remember, against another run home, and it all went like powder, in the Mirzai expedition; and the run home diminished to a month in a boarding-house in the hills. Meanwhile, however, we had begun to correspond with our daughter, in large round words of one syllable, behind which, of course, was plain the patient guiding hand of Aunt Emma. One could hear Aunt Emma suggesting what would be nice to say, trying to instil a little pale affection for the far-off papa and mamma. There was so little Cecily and so much Emma--of course, it could not be otherwise--that I used to take, I fear, but a perfunctory joy in these letters. When we went home again I stipulated absolutely that she was to write to us without any sort of supervision--the child was ten. ‘But the spelling!’ cried Aunt Emma, with lifted eyebrows. ‘Her letters aren’t exercises,’ I was obliged to retort; ‘she will do the best she can.’ We found her a docile little girl, with nice manners, a thoroughly unobjectionable child. I saw quite clearly that I could not have brought her up so well; indeed, there were moments when I fancied that Cecily, contrasting me with her aunts, wondered a little what my bringing up could have been like. With this reserve of criticism on Cecily’s part, however, we got on very tolerably, largely because I found it impossible to assume any responsibility towards her, and in moments of doubt or discipline referred her to her aunts. We spent a pleasant summer with a little girl in the house whose interest in us was amusing, and whose outings it was gratifying to arrange; but when we went back, I had no desire to take her with us. I thought her very much better where she was.