Page:Alice Lauder.pdf/131

This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
ALICE LAUDER.
123

India with him. He flattered himself that Green Street was just the quiet, sleepy, restful little hollow he had been seeking for all his life, well out of the Society track, and inhabited by a few nice friendly souls, principally Mrs. Austin and Alice Lauder, who would provide him with human sympathy and yet not distract him from the pleasing depths of literary work in which he intended to engulf himself. There were half-a-dozen men, too, in the neighbourhood, or in the village, with whom he easily fraternized, finding in this hardy type of young Englishmen once removed, or even in the undiluted native colonial, something pleasantly strong, manly, and individual. The type seemed, on the whole, more handmade and less ordered by the hundred dozen than that of the parent stock. Campbell rapidly became almost too popular, and could hardly move without a bodyguard of what Clare designated the rag-tag and bob-tail of the district. It was invariably found that he had been to school with the doctor’s younger brother; or he had played cricket against the parson’s team once up in Yorkshire; or, if the worst came to the worst, he had often heard of the bank manager’s brother-in-law from a man in the club at Bombay who used to play whist with him. On these grounds he was at once seized