The grass was crisp and pleasant.  Hilda deliberately sought its solace for her feet, letting their pressure linger.  All day long the sun had been drawing the fragrance and the life out of it, and now the air had a sweet, warm, and grateful scent, like that of harvests.  The crickets had been at it since five o’clock, and though the city rose not half a mile across the grass, it was the crickets she heard and listened to.  In making private statements of things, the crickets offered a chorus of agreement, and they never interrupted.  Not that she had much to consider, poor girl, which lent itself to a difference of opinion.  One might have thought her, to meet a situation at any point like her own, not badly equipped.  She had all the argument—­which is like saying all the arms—­and the most accurate understanding; but the only practical outcome of these things had been an intimate lesson in the small value of the intelligence, that flavoured her state with cynicism and made it more piquant.  She did not altogether scorn her own intelligence as the result, because it had always admitted the existence of dominating facts that belonged to life and not to reason; it was only the absurd unexpectedness of coming across one herself.  One might think round such a fact and talk round it—­ there were less exquisite satisfactions—­but it was not to be cowed or abated, and in the end the things one said were only words.

Out there in the grassy spaces she let her thoughts flow through her veins with her blood, warm and free.  The primitive things she saw helped her to a fulness of life; the south wind brought her profound sweet presciences.  A coolie-woman, carrying a basket on her head, stopped and looked at her with full glistening eyes; they smiled at each other, and passed on.  She found herself upon a narrow path, worn smooth by other barefooted coolie-folk; it made in its devious way toward the rich mists where the sun had gone down; and Hilda followed, breasting the glow and the colour and the wide, flat expanse, as if in the India of it there breathed something exquisitely sensuous and satisfying.  It struck sharp on her senses; she almost consciously thanked Heaven for such a responsive set of nerves.  Always and everywhere she was intensely conscious of what she saw and of how she saw it; and it was characteristic of her that she found in that saffron February evening, spreading to a purple rim, with wandering points of colour in a soldier’s coat or a coachman’s turban, an atmosphere and a mise en scene for her own complication.  She could take a tenderly artistic view of that, more soothing a good deal than any result that came of examining it in other lights.  And she did, aware, with smiling eyes, of how full of colour, how dramatic it was.

Nevertheless, she had hardly closed with it; any material outcome seemed a great way off, pursuable by conjecture when there was time for that.  For the present, there on the Maidan with the south wind, she took it with her head thrown up, in her glad, free fashion, as something that came in the way of life—­the delightful way of life—­with which it was absurd to quarrel because of a slight inconvenience or incongruity, things which helped, after all, to make existence fascinating.