When Toppan got back, the rest of Victoria’s men friends shrank considerably when she compared them with Toppan. They were of the type who are in the insurance offices of fathers and uncles during the winter, and in the summer are to be found at the fashionable resorts, where they idle languidly on the beaches in white flannels or play "chopsticks" with the girls on the piano in the hotel parlors. Here, however, was the first white man who had ever crossed Thibet alive, who knew what it meant to go four days without water and who could explain to you the difference between the insanity caused by the lack of sleep and that brought about by a cobra-bite. The men of Victoria’s acquaintance never had known what it was to go without two consecutive meals, whereas Toppan at one time in the Himalayas had lived for several weeks upon ten ounces of camel meat per day, after the animals had died under their burdens. Victoria’s friends led germans, Toppan led expeditions; their only fatigue came from dancing. Upon one occasion on Mount Everest, Toppan and his companions, caught in a snow-storm where sleep meant death, had kept themselves awake by chewing pipe-tobacco, and rubbing the smarting juice in their eyes. He had had experiences, the like of which none other of her gentlemen friends had ever known and she had cared for him from the first. When a man tells a girl that he loves her in a voice that can speak in the dialects of the interior Thibetan states around the Tengrinor lake, or holds her hand in one that has been sunken deep in the throat of a hunger-mad tiger, she cannot well be otherwise than duly impressed. To look at, Victoria was a queen. Just the woman you would have chosen to be mated with a man like Toppan, five feet, eleven in her tennis shoes, with her head flung well back on her shoulders, and the gait of a goddess; she could look down on most men and in general suggested figures of Brunehilde, Boadicea, or Berenice. But to know her was to find her shallow as a sun-shrunken mill-race, to discover that her brilliancy was the cheapest glitter, and to realise that in every way she was lamentably unsuited for the role of Toppan’s wife. And no one saw this so well as Toppan himself. He knew that she did not appreciate him at one-tenth his real value, that she never could and never would understand him, and that he was in every way too good for her. As his wife he felt sure she would only be a hindrance and a stumbling-block in the career that he had planned for himself, if, indeed she did not ruin it entirely.