Men are occasionally particular,
and the least particular men are always the most exacting.
Simla is eccentric in its fashion of tearing friendships. Certain attachments
which have set and crystallized through half a dozen seasons acquire almost
the sanctity of the marriage bond, and are revered as such. Again, certain
attachments equally old, and, to all appearance, equally venerable, never seem
to win any recognized official status; while a chance-sprung acquaintance now
two months born, steps into the place which by right belongs to the senior.
There is no law reducible to print which regulates these affairs.
Some people have a gift which secures them infinite toleration, and others
have not. The Man's Wife had not. If she looked over the garden wall, for
instance, women taxed her with stealing their husbands. She complained
pathetically that she was not allowed to choose her own friends. When she put
up her big white muff to her lips, and gazed over it and under her eyebrows at
you as she said this thing, you felt that she had been infamously misjudged,
and that all the other women's instincts were all wrong; which was absurd. She
was not allowed to own the Tertium Quid in peace; and was so strangely
constructed that she would not have enjoyed peace had she been so permitted.
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