When, after an eight miles’ ride, the Dalehams and Chunerbutty reached the wooden shanty that was the rendezvous of the day, they found that they were not the first arrivals.  Four or five young men swooped joyously down on Noreen and quarrelled over the right to help her from the saddle.  While they were disputing vehemently and pushing each other away the laughing girl slipped unaided to the ground and ran up the wooden steps of the verandah.  She was instantly pursued by the men, who followed her to the back verandah where she had gone to interview her servants.  They clamoured to be allowed to help in any capacity, and she had to assume an indignation and a severity she was far from feeling to drive them away.

“Oh, do go away, please,” she said.  “You are only in the way.  How can I look after tiffin if you interfere with me like this?  Now do be good boys and go off.  There’s Mrs. Rice arriving.  Help her out of her trap.”

They went reluctantly to the aid of the only other lady of their little community, who was apparently unable to climb down from her bamboo cart without help.  Her husband and Daleham were already proferring their services, but they were seemingly insufficient.

Mrs. Rice belonged to the type of woman altogether unsuited to the life of a planter’s wife.  She was a shallow, empty-headed person devoid of mental resources and incapable of taking interest in her household or her husband’s affairs.  In her girlhood she had been pretty in a common style, and she refused to recognise that the days of her youth and good looks had gone by.  On the garden she spent her time lounging in her bungalow in an untidy dressing-gown, skimming through light novels and the fashion papers and writing interminable letters to her family in Balham.  Her elderly husband, a weak, easy-going man, tired of her constant reproaches for having dragged her away from the gay life of her London suburb to the isolation of a tea-garden, spent as much of his day as possible in the factory.  In the bungalow he drank methodically and steadily until he was in a state of mellow contentment and indifferent to his wife’s tongue.

On club days Mrs. Rice was a different woman.  She arrayed herself in the latest fashions, or the nearest approach to them that could be reached by a native tailor working on her back verandah with the guidance of the fashion plates in ladies’ journals.  Her face thickly coated with most of the creams, powders, and complexion beautifiers on the market, she swathed her head in a thick veil thrown over her sun-hat.  Then, prepared for conquest, she climbed into the strong, country-built bamboo cart in which her husband was graciously permitted to drive her to the club.  Fortunately for her a passable road to it ran from her bungalow, for she could not ride.

Arrived at the weekly gathering-place she delighted to surround herself with all the men that she could cajole from the bar running down the side of the one room of the building.  With the extraordinary power of self-deception of vain women she believed that most of them were secretly in love with her.