Even some of the third-rate young men from the city, over whom she had wielded a cheap empire at her mother's boarding-house down the Hammersmith Road, had found such remarks reminiscent of the princess from whose pretty lips toads fell instead of pearls, but Krishn Davenund, student at the Middle Temple, did not know his Mother Goose. Having an all too intimate acquaintance with the poets, however, the superficial refinement of the girl, seen against the background of the only English life he knew, had made him think of the Lady in Comus; for he could have no standard save that of books. She looked dainty enough for any heroine's part even now, after eighteen months' disillusionment, as she stood before him, in a paucity of pink muslin negligé (which had mostly run to frills) and a plenitude of powder. She had an open note in one hand, a half-smoked Turkish cigarette--of Mr. Lucanaster's importing--in the other, and a rather bored good-nature on her face as she looked at the man she had married because her good taste had told her the truth, namely, that he was better-looking and better-bred than any of her other admirers. It had been a hideous mistake, of course; but she was shrewd enough to see that the shock of finding, on his return to India, that there was literally no place for him in it had been quite as painful to her husband as to herself. So she exonerated him of blame, with a sort of contemptuous pity and an absolute lack of sympathy. It was nothing to her, for instance, that, apart from the temporal loss of finding himself only the son of a Hindoo widow who had reverted to the most bigoted austerity on her husband's death, instead of the son of a man high up in Government service, whose position had made unorthodoxy tolerable to relations and friends alike, he should have come back to find a change in himself, to feel a wild revolt against the renewed contact with things which he had, literally, left behind him five years before. The things themselves were too hopelessly, incredibly trivial and childish for her to do anything but laugh at them, so he had soon ceased even to mention them; though they meant far more to him.