Only the night before, in the dining room of the Hong-Kong Hotel,
she had watched him empty glass after glass of whisky, and shudder
and shudder. He did not like it. Why, then, did he touch it?

As he climbed heavily into his chair, she was able to note the
little beads of sweat under the cracked nether lip. He was in
misery; he was paying for last night's debauch. His clothes were
smartly pressed, his linen white, his jaws cleanly shaven; but the
day would come when he would grow indifferent to bodily
cleanliness. What a pity!

For all her ignorance of material things--the human inventions
which served the physical comforts of man--how much she knew about
man himself! She had seen him bereft of all those spiritual props
which permit man to walk on two feet instead of four--broken,
without resilience. And now she was witnessing or observing the
complicated machinery of civilization through which they had come,
at length to land on the beach of her island. She knew now the
supreme human energy which sent men to hell or carried them to
their earthly heights. Selfishness.

Supposing she saw the young man at dinner that night, emptying his
bottle? She could not go to him, sit down and draw the sordid
pictures she had seen so often. In her case the barrier was not
selfishness but the perception that her interest would be
misinterpreted, naturally. What right had a young woman to possess
the scarring and intimate knowledge of that dreg of human society,
the beachcomber?