The husband was a big, burly, rough-and-ready Yorkshireman—­stout, somewhat pompous, about forty, with hair wearing bald on the forehead:  the personification of the successful business man.  “My dear Emmie,” he said, in a loud voice, with a North Country accent, “the cooks have got to live.  They’ve got to live like the rest of us.  I can never persuade you that the hands must always be humoured.  If you don’t humour ’em, they won’t work for you.  It’s a poor tale when the hands won’t work.  Even with galleys on deck, the life of a sea-cook is not generally thowt an enviable position.  Is not a happy one—­not a happy one, as the fellah says in the opera.  You must humour your cooks.  If you stuck ’em in the hold, you’d get no dinner at all—­that’s the long and the short of it.”

The languid lady turned away with a sickly, disappointed air.  “Then they ought to have a conscription, or something,” she said, pouting her lips.  “The Government ought to take it in hand and manage it somehow.  It’s bad enough having to go by these beastly steamers to India at all, without having one’s breath poisoned by—­” the rest of the sentence died away inaudibly in a general murmur of ineffective grumbling.

“Why do you think she is exclusive?” I asked Hilda as we strolled on towards the stern, out of the spoilt child’s hearing.

“Why, didn’t you notice?—­she looked about her when she came on deck to see whether there was anybody who was anybody sitting there, whom she might put her chair near.  But the Governor of Madras hadn’t come up from his cabin yet; and the wife of the chief Commissioner of Oude had three civilians hanging about her seat; and the daughters of the Commander-in-Chief drew their skirts away as she passed.  So she did the next best thing—­sat as far apart as she could from the common herd:  meaning all the rest of us.  If you can’t mingle at once with the Best People, you can at least assert your exclusiveness negatively, by declining to associate with the mere multitude.”

“Now, Hilda, that is the first time I have ever known you to show any feminine ill-nature!”

“Ill-nature!  Not at all.  I am merely trying to arrive at the lady’s character for my own guidance.  I rather like her, poor little thing.  Don’t I tell you she will do?  So far from objecting to her, I mean to go the round of India with her.”

“You have decided quickly.”

“Well, you see, if you insist upon accompanying me, I must have a chaperon; and Lady Meadowcroft will do as well as anybody else.  In fact, being be-ladied, she will do a little better, from the point of view of Society, though that is a detail.  The great matter is to fix upon a possible chaperon at once, and get her well in hand before we arrive at Bombay.”

“But she seems so complaining!” I interposed.  “I’m afraid, if you take her on, you’ll get terribly bored with her.”