Page:An American Girl in India.djvu/209

 'So would I,' she agreed. 'Now the Miss Peninos—there are three of them—will, I think, be of the lean kind. They are frightfully skinny so far, very long and very brown, and they love bright colours, especially peacock blue. That's really all there is to say about them.' Berengaria dismissed the Peninos with a wave of the hand as we reached home, and began to talk of the dinner-party she was giving that night. She told me that it was the 'dustur' of Slumpanugger for the Commissioner mem-sahib to give a big dinner to all the station on Christmas Day, and she always did it, as she believed in keeping up 'dusturs,' because they linked one up with the past. The 'dustur,' as you will have guessed, means the custom of the country, and when you meet one of them, Berengaria once solemnly warned me, it's always best to give in to it straight away. India is a place with any number of 'dusturs' knocking around, and the people have an affection for them. You can fight against them if you like, but if you want a peaceful life take Berengaria's advice and don't.

It was a great event in Slumpanugger—that Christmas dinner. Everybody who was anybody was invited to it, and, as Berengaria put it, the company was 'a bit mixed.' The difficulty was how to send them down, because they all imagined they had precedence of some kind, and the less they had the more huffy they were if they didn't get it. So Berengaria had discarded that bugbear of the Indian hostess—the table of precedence—