IV

In the room that had been his since early maturity Gerrit Ammidon gave
an involuntary sigh of relief. Taou Yuen, his wife, was standing in the
middle of the floor, gazing about with a faint and polite smile. Her eyes
rested on a yellow camphor chest--one of the set brought home by his
father--on a severe high range of drawers made of sycamore with six legs,
on her brilliant reflection in the eagle-crowned mirror above the mantel,
and the sleigh bed with low heavily curved ends.

The situation below, however brief and, on the whole, reasonably
conducted, had been surprisingly difficult. At the same time that he had
felt no necessity to apologize for his marriage he had known that Taou
Yuen must surprise, yes--shock, his family. She was Chinese, to them a
heathen: they would be unable to comprehend any mitigating dignity of
rank. Where they'd actually suffer, he realized, would be in the
attitude of Salem, the stupid gabble, the censure and cold pity caused
by his wife.

Personally he regarded these with the contempt he felt for so many of the
qualities that on shore bound the interests of everyone into a single
common concern. It gave him pleasure to assault the authority and
importance of such public prejudice and self-opinion; but, unavoidably
implicating his family, at once a part of himself and Salem, he was
conscious of the fact that he had laid them all open to disagreeable
moments. He was sorry for this, and his regret, principally materialized
by his father's hurt confusion, had unexpectedly cast a shadow on a scene
to which he had looked forward with a distinct sense of comedy. Where the