intercourse--the sheerest necessity for the preservation of his disdain.

She had cried on his shoulder, in his arms, practically; he had acted in
the purely fraternal manner. But the thing was reaching a natural
conclusion when her grandfather, Barzil Dunsack, had interfered with his
unsupportably frank accusations and command. The _Nautilus_ had been
ready for sea, and his, Gerrit's, imperious resentment had carried him
out of the Dunsacks' house--to Shanghai and Taou Yuen--without another
word to Nettie.

How strangely life progressed, without chart or intelligent observations
or papers! He heard the tap of his wife's pipe; there was a faint
sweetish odor of drugged tobacco and the scent of cloves in which she
saturated herself. Outside was Salem, dim and without perceptible
movement; the clock in the hall struck ten. Taou Yuen didn't approach him
again nor speak; her perceptions were wonderfully acute.

The sense of loneliness that sometimes overtook him on shore deepened, a
feeling of impotence, as if he had suddenly waked, lost and helpless, in
an unfamiliar planet. There was the soft whisper of his wife's passage
across the room. In the lamplight the paint on her cheeks made startling
unnatural patches of--paint. The reflections slid over the liquid black
mass of her hair, died in the lustrous creamy folds of her garment. She
was at once grotesque and impressive, like a figure in a Chinese
pantomime watched from the western auditorium of his inheritance. His
fondness for her, his admiration, had not lessened. He surveyed his
position, the presence here, in his room at Java Head, of Taou Yuen, with
amazement; all the small culminating episodes lost, the result was beyond
credence. His thoughts returned to Rhoda's accusation of selfishness, the
disaster implied in her pity for his wife. He tried again to analyze his