other nice men, and took me to a concert at the Philharmonic Society. He
was getting to like me, I could tell that, when grandfather interfered--"

"I see," Dunsack interrupted, "with the immorality of the supermoral."

"Whatever it was he was past bearing. No one could blame Gerrit for
getting into a fury. The next day I stood almost in this spot, it was
late afternoon too, and watched the _Nautilus_ sail away. All the canvas
was set and I could see her for a long time. When the last trace had
gone it seemed to me that my life had sunk too ... out there."

"The old man's a fool," he said bluntly of his father. "How do you
suppose he got hold of a Manchu?" he shifted his thought, addressing the
stillness about them rather than his companion. "Don't imagine for a
minute that you are superior to her," he told Nettie more directly.
"There is nothing more remarkable. They must be gorgeous," a faint color
stained his long cheeks. "What incredible luck," he murmured.

He was thinking avidly of the women of China--the little gay girls like
toys, the momentary glimpses of enameled faces in hurrying red-flowered
sedan chairs, faces of ivory stained with carmine, in gold-crusted
headdresses. A sudden impatience at Nettie Vollar's obvious person and
clothes expanded to a detestation of an atmosphere he had but a minute or
so before welcomed as an escape from something infinitely worse than
death. Now it seemed impossible to spend a life in Salem. It would have
been better, when he had been released by Heard and Company, to have
taken the position open in the Dutch Hong.

He was in a continual state of such vacillation, as if he were the seat
of two separate and antagonistic personalities; rather, he changed the