We were sitting around the campfire after dinner, enjoying our Chateau Cardboard. The colonel was only a one-glass drinker but the girls had developed quite a thirst.

How could the flogger of urchins be otherwise than animated and joyous?

Tin Maung gave an order and in due course the head-waiter arrived, a rollicking Shan with shining bald head and Manchu moustaches, carrying a dish heaped with scrawny chickens' limbs, jaundiced with curry, a bowl of rice and a couple of aluminium plates.

To ride; to dance; she had adored all that. Or going long walks in the country, talking, about books, what to do with one’s life, for young people were amazingly priggish—oh, the things one had said!