Hilda cut her short with a sunny smile—­half contemptuous toleration, half genuine pity.  “We are all ungrateful,” she said; “but the poor, I think, the least so.  I’m sure the gratitude I’ve often had from my poor women at St. Nathaniel’s has made me sometimes feel really ashamed of myself.  I had done so little—­and they thanked me so much for it.”

“Which only shows,” Lady Meadowcroft broke in, “that one ought always to have a lady to nurse one.”

“Ca marche!” Hilda said to me, with a quiet smile, a few minutes after, when her ladyship had disappeared in her fluffy robe down the companion-ladder.

“Yes, ca marche,” I answered.  “In an hour or two you will have succeeded in landing your chaperon.  And what is most amusing, landed her, too, Hilda, just by being yourself—­letting her see frankly the actual truth of what you think and feel about her and about everyone!”

“I could not do otherwise,” Hilda answered, growing grave.  “I must be myself, or die for it.  My method of angling consists in showing myself just as I am.  You call me an actress, but I am not really one; I am only a woman who can use her personality for her own purposes.  If I go with Lady Meadowcroft, it will be a mutual advantage.  I shall really sympathise with her for I can see the poor thing is devoured with nervousness.”

“But do you think you will be able to stand her?” I asked.

“Oh, dear, yes.  She’s not a bad little thing, au fond, when you get to know her.  It is society that has spoilt her.  She would have made a nice, helpful, motherly body if she’d married the curate.”

As we neared Bombay, conversation grew gradually more and more Indian; it always does under similar circumstances.  A sea voyage is half retrospect, half prospect; it has no personal identity.  You leave Liverpool for New York at the English standpoint, and are full of what you did in London or Manchester; half-way over, you begin to discuss American custom-houses and New York hotels; by the time you reach Sandy Hook, the talk is all of quick trains west and the shortest route from Philadelphia to New Orleans.  You grow by slow stages into the new attitude; at Malta you are still regretting Europe; after Aden, your mind dwells most on the hire of punkah-wallahs and the proverbial toughness of the dak-bungalow chicken.

“How’s the plague at Bombay now?” an inquisitive passenger inquired of the Captain at dinner our last night out.  “Getting any better?”

Lady Meadowcroft’s thumb dived between her fingers again.  “What! is there plague in Bombay?” she asked, innocently, in her nervous fashion.

“Plague in Bombay!” the Captain burst out, his burly voice resounding down the saloon.  “Why, bless your soul, ma’am, where else would you expect it?  Plague in Bombay!  It’s been there these five years.  Better?  Not quite.  Going ahead like mad.  They’re dying by thousands.”