“That will be rather hard for you, won't it?” he remarked, after a time. “I mean for a person of your temperament. You are, I should say, almost exactly my opposite in every respect. You like people, friends. You are impulsive, doubtless affectionate. I could be relatively happy, marooned among a few hundred millions of yellow folk—though I could forego the missionaries. But you are likely, I should think, to be starved there. Spiritually—emotionally.”
“Do you think so?” said she quietly.
“Yes.” He thought it, over “The life of a mission compound isn't exactly gay.”
“No, it isn't.”
“And you need gaiety.”
“I wonder if I do. I haven't really faced it, of course. I'm not facing it now.”
“Just think a moment. You've not even landed in China yet. You're under no real restraint—still among white people, on a white man's ship, eating in European hotels at the ports. You aren't teaching endless lessons to yellow children, day in, day out. You aren't shut up in an interior city, where it mightn't even he safe for you to step outside the gate house alone. And yet you're breaking bounds. Right now—out here with me.”
Already she was taking his curious bluntness for granted. She said now, simply, gently:
“I know. I'm sitting out here at midnight with a married man. And I don't seem to mind. Of course you're not exactly married. Still... A few days ago I wouldn't have thought it possible.”
“Did you tell the Hasmers that you were out here last night?”