He was not a born traveler; still less was he an explorer. At the end of
three days he was glad to take leave of his hosts at the hospital, and
turn his launch down the river toward the civilization of Shanghai. But
it was on the very afternoon of his departure that the ideas came to him
which ultimately took him back to Boston, and of which he was now
thinking as he strolled through the silvery mist beside the Charles.

He had been standing then on the deck of his steam-launch gazing beyond
the river, with its crowding, outlandish junks, beyond the towns and
villages huddled along the banks, beyond walls gay with wistaria, beyond
green rice-fields stretching into the horizon, to where a flaming sunset
covered half the sky--a sunset which itself seemed hostile, mysterious,
alien, Mongolian. He was thinking that it was on just this scene that
his father and mother had looked year upon year before his birth. He
wondered how it was that it had had no prenatal influence on himself. He
wondered how it was that all their devotion had ended with themselves,
that their altruism had died when Corinna Meecham's soul had passed-away
and Rufus Hallett, like another Stephen, had fallen on his knees beneath
the missiles of the villagers to whom he was coming with relief. They
had spent their lives in the service of others; he had spent his in his
own. It was curious. If there was anything in heredity, he ought to have
felt at least some faint impulse from their zeal; but he never had. He
could not remember that he had ever done anything for any one. He could
not remember that he had ever seen the need of it. It was curious. He
mused on it--mused on the odd differences between one generation and
another, and on the queer way in which what is light to the father will
sometimes become darkness in the son.

It was then that he found the question raising itself within him, "Is
that what's wrong with me?"