Continually producing, with an air of triumph, cockroaches and other horrors

From The Great Mutiny by Christopher Hibbert. Page 35.

If a multiplicity of servants helped to ease the daily life of Englishmen at military stations in India, their wives and daughters were even more indulged. 'If they drop a handkerchief they just lower their voices and say "Boy!" in a very gentle tone and then creeps in some wizened, skinny brownie, looking like a superannuated thread-paper, who twiddles after them for a little while and then creeps out again as softly as a black cat.'

The lady's day might begin with an early morning ride followed by a leisurely tour of her house to ensure that the servants were attending to their appropriate duties and that nothing had been illicitly removed from the store-cupboards; or she might walk over to a meeting of the Mutton Club to discuss the sharing of a slaughtered sheep, or go out to inspect the garden. She would take her parasol as a matter of course for her skin had always to be carefully protected; pale com- plexions were essential to those with pretensions to good looks; the 'merest touch of the tarbrush' was 'sufficient to create a stigma'. She might then settle down to write one of those long letters which were regularly dispatched to friends and relations in England; or she might read a book, a novel from the library perhaps or, if she were of more serious bent, a book of sermons. Alternatively she might attend to her book of pressed wild flowers or her collection of insects.

Collections of coleoptera were quite fashionable for a time, and several ladies, finding on their arrival in India that their fellow Anglo-Indians could not tell them the names of any beetles or butterflies and that Indians (putting on enormous spectacles, pursing their lips, tilting their heads to one side as though really interested in the problem) asserted that this was a particularly rare species till now unnamed, formed sudden resolves to be naturalists. But the making of a collection was always a difficulty; for one could not go hunting beetles oneself - one's husband would have been sadly distressed at such undignified conduct - which meant that one had to delegate this duty to servants; who, in spite of professing enthusiastic interest in their mistress's hobby, were dreadfully stupid, continually producing with an air of triumph cockroaches and other horrors, instead of the beautiful winged insects, metallic-glistening and many-coloured that whirred past one's lamp in the evening.