There's Mrs. Rice arriving. Help her out of her trap."
They went reluctantly to the aid of the only other lady of their little
community, who was apparently unable to climb down from her bamboo cart
without help. Her husband and Daleham were already proferring their
services, but they were seemingly insufficient.
Mrs. Rice belonged to the type of woman altogether unsuited to the life of
a planter's wife. She was a shallow, empty-headed person devoid of mental
resources and incapable of taking interest in her household or her
husband's affairs. In her girlhood she had been pretty in a common style,
and she refused to recognise that the days of her youth and good looks had
gone by. On the garden she spent her time lounging in her bungalow in an
untidy dressing-gown, skimming through light novels and the fashion papers
and writing interminable letters to her family in Balham. Her elderly
husband, a weak, easy-going man, tired of her constant reproaches for
having dragged her away from the gay life of her London suburb to the
isolation of a tea-garden, spent as much of his day as possible in the
factory. In the bungalow he drank methodically and steadily until he was in
a state of mellow contentment and indifferent to his wife's tongue.
On club days Mrs. Rice was a different woman. She arrayed herself in the
latest fashions, or the nearest approach to them that could be reached by a
native tailor working on her back verandah with the guidance of the fashion
plates in ladies' journals.
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