How strange we English seem in India, a little . Are we anything more than accidental, anything more than the messenger-boy who has brought the of the new effort towards civilization through the gates of the East? Are we or just a means, taken up and used by the great forces of God?  
I do not know, I have never been able to tell. I have never been able to decide whether we are the greatest or the dullest of peoples.
 
I think we are an imaginative people with an imagination at once gigantic, heroic and shy, and also we are a strangely restrained and disciplined people who are yet neither nor subordinated.... These are flat contradictions to state, and yet how else can one render the of the English character and this spectacle of a handful of mute, , not obviously clever and quite obviously ill-educated men, holding together kingdoms, tongues and races, three hundred millions of them, in a restless peace? Again and again in India I would find myself in little circles of the official English,-supercilious, , conventional, carefully "turned out" people, living gawkily, thinking gawkily, talking nothing but sport and gossip, relaxing at rare into sentimentality and as mean as a banjo , and a kind of despairful disgust would me. And then in some man's work, in some huge irrigation scheme, some of strategic , some simple, of deep-lying things, I would find an effect, as if out of a thickly sheath one had pulled a sword and found it—flame....
 
I recall one evening I spent at a little station in Bengal, between Lucknow and Delhi, an evening given over to private . The theatre was a huge tent, and the little roughly stage was lit by a row of oil footlights and so small as barely to give a foothold for the actors and actresses in the more crowded scenes. About me were the great people, the colonel's wife, a touring young man of family, officers and the wife of the manager of the big sugar close at hand. Behind were English of a more social position, also connected with the sugar refinery, a Eurasian family or so, very dressy and aggressive and terribly snubbed, and then I think various and other nondescripts and groups of non-commissioned officers and men, some with their wives. The play, admirably chosen, was that crystallization of liberal Victorian , Caste, and I remember there was a sub-current of amusement because the young officer who played—what is the name of the hero's friend? I forget—had in the haste of his superficiality adopted a moustache that would not keep on and an eyeglass that would not keep in.
 
Everybody was very badly, nobody was word-perfect and a raspin............