He says he's the only writer on Indian subjects who isn't disqualified by ever having been there, and is consequently quite free of prejudice." "Ah!" said Elfrida, "how _banal!_ I thought you said there would be something real here--somebody in whose garment's hem there would be virtue." "And I suggest the dress-coat of the historian of the Semitic nations!" Janet laughed.

"Well, if nearly all our poets are dead and our novelists in the colonies, I can't help it, can I! Here is Mr.Kendal, at all events." Kendal came up, with his perfect manners, and immediately it seemed to Elfrida that their little group became distinct from the rest, more important, more worthy of observation.

Kendal never added anything to the unities of their conversation when he joined these two; he seemed rather to break up what they had to say to each other and attract it to himself.

He always gave an accent to the life and energy of their talk; but he made them both self-conscious and watchful--seemed to put them, as it were, upon their guard against one another, in a way which Janet found vaguely distressing.

It was invariably as if Kendal turned their intercourse into a joust by his mere presence as spectator; as if--Janet put it plainly to herself, reddening--they mutely asked him to bestow the wreath on one of them.