and gaunt and yellow as his face. All this would come as a result of
throwing the opium into the harbor. It was as good as accomplished.

In the face of his prospective well-being he felt already the equal of
anyone in Salem. If Gerrit Ammidon had married a Manchu lady it was his
privilege, no, duty, to call and put his experience in things Chinese at
their command. She would speak only a little if any English; no one here
understood the preparation of her food--her delicate necessity for dishes
not the property of an entire household; a hundred such details of which
the infinitely cruder West must be ignorant. He thought complacently that
he would understand her better than anyone else in Salem, in Boston, in
America; far better than her husband. She would without doubt learn to
depend on him: they would laugh together at the manners and people about
them. Ammidon would be away for long periods on the China service.--

His dreams broke off with a sardonic laugh, a repetition of the tone in
which he had objurgated the ship-master. Such visions were the property
of youth, and he was forty-two, forty-two and nothing more than a
discredited clerk who had fled across the world from a shadow. But he was
right--he had seen white men who had caught the breath of China accepting
just such opportunities as the one offered to him after his dismissal by
Augustine Heard. At the Dutch Hong he'd be expected to talk about his
late employer. Such situations, he had realized in a rarely illuminating
flash, were only temporary, a descending flight.

These men resembled the fate of, say, a brig sailing into the China
Sea in all the perfection of order of the British Marine: at, perhaps,
Hong Kong, sold to a native firm, she would be refitted under an
extravagant flag, and slowly the order would depart until, in a
slovenly tangle of rigging and defilement, she'd be seen yawing on