curl, and you had to reduce your luggage into a sort of knapsack, where there wasn't any room for frills at all, and where you were hoisted about on elephants and camels and had to be very nippy to escape wild beasts and snakes and all manner of creepy things, and from the pictures I had seen I was quite certain that a topi wouldn't suit me, and I admit that I'm inclined to get freckles in the sun. Still, it wasn't to be denied that going out to India for the winter had its advantages too. I'm a great believer in the power of absence. Of course, it must be discreet and well-timed. You must ring the curtain up and down with all the worldly wisdom that you have. You must disappear exactly at the right moment and with a certain amount of noise, or your exit won't have the desired effect, and, awful and humiliating calamity, it may even pass unnoticed. And as for your reappearance, that requires even more diplomacy. To turn up right down suddenly, like Anne Boleyn, and find Jane Seymour sitting on your husband's knee, would stump most people, and doesn't tend towards a friendly family reunion. Now if Anne Boleyn could have managed to come in soft and melting like when Henry was alone and hadn't seen a skirt for twenty-four hours—though I admit this would have been difficult, Henry being what he was—who knows what a happy, loving couple they might not have been ever afterwards, not to speak of there being four Queens less in history to tax the memory of all the generations that came after. Say, though, I'm shying off the main point.
