No More Learning

"

At twenty the things for which one does not care a damn should,
properly, be many, but one must not include mothers in the list. I told
him this gently; and he described Her, even as Adam must have described
to the newly named beasts the glory and tenderness and beauty of Eve.
Incidentally I learned that She was a tobacconist's assistant with a
weakness for pretty dress, and had told him four or five times already
that She had never been kissed by a man before.

Charlie spoke on, and on, and on; while I, separated from him by
thousands of years, was considering the beginnings of things. Now I
understood why the Lords of Life and Death shut the doors so carefully
behind us. It is that we may not remember our first wooings. Were it not
so, our world would be without inhabitants in a hundred years.

"Now, about that galley-story," I said, still more cheerfully, in a
pause in the rush of the speech.

Charlie looked up as though he had been hit. "The galley--what galley?
Good heavens, don't joke, man! This is serious! You don't know how
serious it is! "

Grish Chunder was right. Charlie had tasted the love of woman that kills
remembrance, and the "finest story" in the world would never be written.
* * * * *




VOLUME IV UNDER THE DEODARS




THE EDUCATION OF OTIS YEERE


I

In the pleasant orchard-closes
"God bless all our gains," say we;
But "May God bless all our losses,"
Better suits with our degree.
--The Lost Bower.

This is the history of a failure; but the woman who failed said that it
might be an instructive tale to put into print for the benefit of the
younger generation. The younger generation does not want instruction,
being perfectly willing to instruct if any one will listen to it. None
the less, here begins the story where every right-minded story should
begin, that is to say at Simla, where all things begin and many come to
an evil end.

The mistake was due to a very clever woman making a blunder and not
retrieving it. Men are licensed to stumble, but a clever woman's mistake
is outside the regular course of Nature and Providence; since all good
people know that a woman is the only infallible thing in this world,
except Government Paper of the '70 issue, bearing interest at four and
a half per cent. Yet, we have to remember that six consecutive days of
rehearsing the leading part of The Fallen Age, at the New Gaiety Theatre
where the plaster is not yet properly dry, might have brought about an
unhingement of spirits which, again, might have led to eccentricities.

Mrs. Hauksbee came to "The Foundry" to tiffin with Mrs. Mallowe, her one
bosom friend, for she was in no sense "a woman's woman. " And it was a
woman's tiffin, the door shut to all the world; and they both talked
chiffons, which is French for Mysteries.

"I've enjoyed an interval of sanity," Mrs. Hauksbee announced, after
tiffin was over and the two were comfortably settled in the little
writing-room that opened out of Mrs. Mallowe's bedroom.

"My dear girl, what has he done?