It was enjoyable to
be abroad, in the brushing fellowship of the pavements, in touch with
brown humility, half-clad and going afoot, since even brown humility
seemed well affected toward the world, alert and content. The air was
full of the comfortable flavour of food-stuffs and spiced luxuries and
the incense of wayside trees; it was as if the sun laid a bland
compelling hand upon the city, bidding strange flowers bloom and strange
fruits increase. Brokers' gharries rattled past, each holding a pale
young man preoccupied with a note-book; where the bullock-carts gathered
themselves together and blocked the road the pale young men put excited
heads out of the gharry windows and used remarkable imprecations. One of
them, as Hilda turned into the compound of the _Calcutta Chronicle_,
leaned out to take off his hat, and sent her up to the office of that
journal in the pleasant reflection of his infinite interest in life.
"Upon my word," she said to herself, as she ascended the stairs behind
the lean legs of a Mussulman servant in a dirty shirt and an embroidered
cap, "he's so light-hearted, so general, that one doubts the very
tremendous effect even of a failure like the one he contemplates.
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