So we continue to exchange our depreciated smiles, and only privately admit that the person who most desires to be agreeable to us is the person whom we regard with the greatest suspicion.

As between Dora Harris and myself there could be, naturally, no ax to grind.

We amused ourselves by looking on penetratingly but tolerantly at the grinding of other people's.
That was a very principal bond between us, that uncompromising clearness with which we looked at the place we lived in, and on the testimony of which we were so certain that we didn't like it.

The women were nearly all so much in heaven in Simla, the men so well satisfied to be there too, at the top of the tree, that our dissatisfaction gave us to one another the merit of originality, almost proved in one another a superior mind.

It was not that either of us would have preferred to grill out our days in the plains; we always had a saving clause for the climate, the altitude, the scenery; it was Simla intrinsic, Simla as its other conditions made it, with which we found such liberal fault.