This was the curious reason why Miss Anderson’s travels were so long postponed. Chapter 3.II. It was Madeline’s fancy to enjoy the contrast between West and East in all its sharpness, so she and Brookes embarked at San Francisco for Yokohama. Their wanderings in Japan were ideal, in spite of Brookes’s ungrateful statement that she could have done with fewer eggs and more bacon; and Madeline prolonged the appeal of the country to her sense of humour and fantasy, putting off her departure for India from week to week. She went at last in March; and found herself down with fever at Benares in the middle of one particularly hot April, two months after the last of her fellow travellers had sailed from Bombay, haunted on her baking pillow by pictorial views of the burning ghat and the vultures. The station doctor, using appalling language to her punkah-coolie, ordered her to the hills; and thus it was that she went to Simla, where she had no intention of going, and where this story really begins. Brookes has always declared that Providence in sending Miss Anderson to Simla had it in mind to prevent a tragedy; but as to that there is room for a difference of opinion: besides I can not be anticipated by Brookes. ‘It’s the oddest place imaginable, and in many ways the most delightful,’ Madeline wrote to her sister Adele, ‘this microcosm of Indian official society withdrawn from all the world, and playing at being a municipality on three Himalayan mountaintops. You can’t imagine its individuality, its airy, unsubstantial, superior poise. How can I explain to you elderly gentlemen, whose faces express daily electric communications with the Secretary of State, playing tennis violently every single afternoon in striped flannels--writing letters of admonition to the Amir all day long, and in the evening, with the assistance of yellow wigs and make-up sticks from the Calcutta hair-dresser, imagining that they produce things, poor dears, only a LITTLE less well done than is done at the Lyceum? Nothing is beyond them. I assure you they are contemplating at the moment ‘The Second Mrs. Tanqueray’. The effect of remoteness from the world, I suppose, and the enormous mutual appreciation of people who have watched each other climb. For to arrive officially at Simla they have had to climb in more ways than one...It is all so hilarious, so high-spirited, so young and yet, my word! what a cult of official dignity underlying! I saw a staff-officer in full uniform, red and white feathers and all, going to the birthday dinner at the Viceroy’s the other evening in a perambulator--rickshaw, you know, such as they have in Japan. That is typical of the place. All the honours and dignities--and a perambulator to put them in--or a ridiculous little white-washed house made of mud and tin, and calling itself Warwick Castle, Blenheim, Abbotsford! They haven’t a very good hold, these Simla residences, and sometimes they