He was back at the hotel between seven and eight, but couldn't eat. For an hour he walked his room, locked in. Then, in sheer loneliness, a little afraid of himself, he went down to the spacious lounge and sat in a corner, behind a palm, staring at a copy of the _China Press_ and listening, all overstrung nerves, to the cackle and laughter of the self-centered tourists and the curiously bold and loud commercial men from across the Pacific. He heard this, in his younger way, as Doane would have heard it, even as Hui; it was all heedless, light-brained; careless.... Confused with the bitterness (in a bewildering degree) was a sense of the finely reflective atmosphere that had lately enveloped him and that he was not to lose easily. He felt--sitting, all nerves, in this babel--the fine old Chinese gentleman who had gone serenely to the death that was his destiny. He felt--constantly, intensely--the princess who had brought to her American college an instinct for culture the like of which neither he nor any of his friends at home had brought or found there. And he felt Mr. Doane--felt a spaciousness of mind in the man, a patience, a tolerance--felt him as a gentleman--felt him while still, in his heart, he was bitterly fighting him.... The thing had closed over his head--the sheer quality of these remarkable folk. He was simply out of a cruder world. He hadn't the right to stand with them--the simple right of character and breeding. And no amount of determination, no amount of storming at it could alter the fact. It would take years of patient work. Ever, then he might miss it; for his environment soon again would be that of the cackling tourists he now hated. Even at college it would be all the dominant athletics, the parties and the motors and girls and drinking, the association with those sons of prosperous families who were all consciously cementing alliances with the financial upper class that quietly ruled America while hired politicians prated and performed without in the smallest measure controlling or even altering the blatant facts.... He and his kind, at college, despised the “grind.” And you had to be a grind if you weren't the other thing. Yet Hui Pei had managed it differently. She was neither and both. It seemed to be a difference of mental texture.... A slim girl, richly dressed, with a sable wrap about her shoulders and a pretty little hat, was threading her way among the crowding chairs and tables and the talkative groups in the lounge. He glanced up: then looked closely. It was Dixie Carmichael. She stood before him, wearing her icy, faintly mocking smile. He rose. “How are you?” said she. He could only incline his head with a sort of courtesy, and contrive an artificial smile. He seemed to have been dreaming, outrageously. Life had begun now'. “I'm running down to Singapore,” said she. “Friends there. And a look-see?”