"It might have been," she acknowledged listlessly, her gaze still on the horizon. "He came to see me two or three times, quite differently from 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 figure, in him the East struggled with the West. It was necessary for the latter to triumph. The difficulty lay in the fact that the first was represented by an actual circumstance while the other was only a dim apprehension, a weakened allegiance to ties never strong.