This was on Thursday. Rocky walked at a feverish pace from the native city to the European settlement that was so quaintly not Chinese—more, with its Western-style buildings that were decorated with ornamental iron balconies and richly colored Chinese signs, like a “China-town” in an American city—and wandered for a time along Nanking Road; then out to Bubbling Well Road; away out, past the Country Club to the almost absurdly suburban quarter with its comfortably British villas; seeing, however, little of the busy life that moved about him, threading his way over cross-streets without a conscious glance at the motorcars and pony-drawn victorias (with turbanned mafoos cracking their whips) and bicycles and the creaking passenger wheelbarrow's on which fat native women with tiny stumps of feet rode precariously. For those few hours were to be recalled in later years as the quietly darkest in the young man's life. There was no question now of dissipation; he knew with the decisiveness of the Kanes that he had turned definitely away from the morbid oblivion of alcohol and opium, as from the unhealthy if exciting diversion of loveless women. But the bitterness would not down all at once. Indeed it was savagely powerful, still, to cloud his reason. The only evidence of victory over self of which he was aware was the fact that he could now look almost objectively at himself, and could fight.
He was back at the hotel between seven and eight, but couldn't eat. For an hour he walked his room, locked in. Then, in sheer loneliness, a little afraid of himself, he went down to the spacious lounge and sat in a corner, behind a palm, staring at a copy of the China Press and listening, all overstrung nerves, to the cackle and laughter of the self-centered tourists and the curiously bold and loud commercial men from across the Pacific. He heard this, in his younger way, as Doane would have heard it, even as Hui; it was all heedless, light-brained; careless.... Confused with the bitterness (in a bewildering degree) was a sense of the finely reflective atmosphere that had lately enveloped him and that he was not to lose easily. He felt—sitting, all nerves, in this babel—the fine old Chinese gentleman who had gone serenely to the death that was his destiny. He felt—constantly, intensely—the princess who had brought to her American college an instinct for culture the like of which neither he nor any of his friends at home had brought or found there. And he felt Mr. Doane—felt a spaciousness of mind in the man, a patience, a tolerance—felt him as a gentleman—felt him while still, in his heart, he was bitterly fighting him.... The thing had closed over his head—the sheer quality of these remarkable folk. He was simply out of a cruder world. He hadn't the right to stand with them—the simple right of character and breeding. And no amount of determination, no amount of storming at it could alter the fact. It would take years of patient work. Ever, then he might miss it; for his environment soon again would be that of the cackling tourists he now hated. Even at college it would be all the dominant athletics, the parties and the motors and girls and drinking, the association with those sons of prosperous families who were all consciously cementing alliances with the financial upper class that quietly ruled America while hired politicians prated and performed without in the smallest measure controlling or even altering the blatant facts.... He and his kind, at college, despised the “grind.” And you had to be a grind if you weren't the other thing. Yet Hui Pei had managed it differently. She was neither and both. It seemed to be a difference of mental texture....
A slim girl, richly dressed, with a sable wrap about her shoulders and a pretty little hat, was threading her way among the crowding chairs and tables and the talkative groups in the lounge. He glanced up: then looked closely. It was Dixie Carmichael. She stood before him, wearing her icy, faintly mocking smile. He rose.
“How are you?” said she.
He could only incline his head with a sort of courtesy, and contrive an artificial smile. He seemed to have been dreaming, outrageously. Life had begun now'.
“I'm running down to Singapore,” said she. “Friends there. And a look-see?”
“Oh,” he murmured, “indeed.” She looked out-and-out rich; and she was surprisingly pretty, without a sign that she had ever known danger or even care.
“Staying here?” she asked.
“No. I start back home Saturday.”
“So?.... Well, that'll be pleasant.” With a final glance of what seemed almost like triumph she sailed away. And he knew that in taking the pearls he had not taken all from her. Apparently, too, she meant him to know it. That would be her moment of triumph. And that was all; not a word was spoken regarding his violence or her threats.... He saw the yellow porters carrying out her luggage of bright new leather.