Since coming back from Agra we have stayed at the Grand Hotel.  It is a comfortable, airy place, wonderfully pleasant in the morning when we sit at a little table in the verandah looking out on the Maidan, and flat-faced hill-waiters bring us an excellent breakfast.  Our own servants are with us—­Autolycus and Bella.  When we arrived very early in the morning and the coolies were carrying up our luggage, a servant sleeping outside his master’s door held up his hand for quietness, saying something quite gently about not waking his master, “Beat him,” said Autolycus to the coolies quite without heat, as he hurried on.

The air gets hotter, and everything looks more and more tired every day.  Even proud-pied April dressed in all its trim can’t put a spirit of youth into anything.

But these last days in Calcutta, in spite of fears and heat, are very pleasant.  I don’t know how I could have said the Calcutta women were horrid!  Now that I am going to leave them they seem so kind and attractive.  Every minute of my time is filled up with river-picnics, garden-parties, tennis tournaments, dinners and theatre parties; and my mornings are spent with G. raking in queer shops for curiosities.  I am insatiable for things to take home, and Autolycus has packed and roped three large wooden boxes containing my treasures.

I wish life weren’t such a mixed thing.  Just when I am tiptoeing on the heights of joy because I am going home, I am brought to common earth with a thud by the miserable thought that I must leave Boggley.  (How pleasant it would be to have a sort of spiritual whipping-boy to bear the nasty things in life for one—­the disappointments, the worries, the times of illness and sorrow, the partings.) Boggley says it will be all right once I am away.  As a rule he only feels pleasantly home-sick.  Now, with the preparations for departure constantly before him, helping to address boxes to the familiar old places, going with me in imagination from port to port till we reach cool Western lands, I’m afraid he has many a pang.

I am so sorry you are so worried.  You will almost have got my letter by this time, but I wish I had cabled as you asked, only, somehow, I didn’t like the idea.  I thought you knew I cared; but, after all, how could you?  I didn’t know myself when I left England.  Looking back I seem always to have cared immensely.  How could I help it?  What I can’t understand is how every woman of your acquaintance doesn’t care as I do; you seem to me so lovable.  I am so glad (though it seems an odd thing to be glad about!) that you have no mother and no sister.  I don’t feel such a marauder as I would have done if, by taking you, I had robbed some other woman.  And I am glad of your lonely life.  I shall be able to show you what a nice thing a home is.  A quiet, safe place we shall make it, where worldly cares may not enter.  Boggley says I can make an hotel room look home-like, and, indeed, it is almost my only