“Please! I don' know what you coul' have thought--how young you thought I was when I wen' to college. But tha's the way it is. I'm an ol' lady. I have learn' to like you ver' much. I'm fond of you. I wan' to feel always tha' we're frien's. But we coul'n' be happy together. Our interes' aren' the same--they coul'n' be. Can' you see, Rocky? If there is something abou' me tha' stirs you--that is ver' won'erful. But we mus'n' let it hurt you. An' that isn' the same as marriage. Marriage is differen'--there mus' be so much in common--if a man an' woman are to live together an' work together, they mus' think an' hope an'....” Her voice died out. She was gazing again, mournfully at the dahlias. When he released her hands they lay limp in her lap. With a great effort of will he wished her every happiness, promised to write, and got himself away. This was on Thursday. Rocky walked at a feverish pace from the native city to the European settlement that was so quaintly not Chinese--more, with its Western-style buildings that were decorated with ornamental iron balconies and richly colored Chinese signs, like a “China-town” in an American city--and wandered for a time along Nanking Road; then out to Bubbling Well Road; away out, past the Country Club to the almost absurdly suburban quarter with its comfortably British villas; seeing, however, little of the busy life that moved about him, threading his way over cross-streets without a conscious glance at the motorcars and pony-drawn victorias (with turbanned mafoos cracking their whips) and bicycles and the creaking passenger wheelbarrow's on which fat native women with tiny stumps of feet rode precariously. For those few hours were to be recalled in later years as the quietly darkest in the young man's life. There was no question now of dissipation; he knew with the decisiveness of the Kanes that he had turned definitely away from the morbid oblivion of alcohol and opium, as from the unhealthy if exciting diversion of loveless women. But the bitterness would not down all at once. Indeed it was savagely powerful, still, to cloud his reason. The only evidence of victory over self of which he was aware was the fact that he could now look almost objectively at himself, and could fight.