"They are as bad as possible," she told him. She admitted this frankly, a part of her entire surrender to the moment, careless of how it might affect him. "They would be," he muttered savagely. "It's a habit ... here." The "here," she knew, referred to life on shore; his gloomy attitude toward the management and affairs of the land had caused her a great deal of precious laughter. He had revealed a most astonishing ignorance of necessities that she had understood instinctively when hardly more than a child; and this simplicity had, as much as anything, brought her affection for him to life. At the same time she in particular had felt the justice of a great many of his charges. But no one could reasonably hope for the sort of world--a world as orderly and trim as that of a narrow ship--he thought should be brought about by a mere command. Nettie wished that it could! She sighed, gazing at him. "Then it's no better than before?" he asked, adding, with a descriptive gesture: "the town and people?" "I hardly speak to ten in a year, outside the stores and like that. Of course they nod going into church, or a lady, I mean really, your sister-in-law, will say something nice, even do what you saw to-night. Though it's the first time anything like that has happened." She caught a repressed bitter oath. "I suppose I'll get used to it," she continued. "No, I won't," she added differently; "never, never, never." "If you were a man now--" he said with an incredible stupidity. She wondered angrily if he'd rather have her a man; there had been a time, Nettie reflected, when such a possibility would have stirred him to violent protest. And this brought out the reflection that, while at one time he might have cared for her, now perhaps he was merely sorry for her unhappiness. Yes, this must be it. She had a momentary fatal impulse to throw back at him scornfully any such small kindness. She didn't, she told herself, want condescending sympathy. What silenced her was the sudden knowledge that she did; she wanted anything whatsoever from Gerrit Ammidon. The fact that he had a Chinese wife was powerless to alter her feeling in the smallest degree. On the contrary, she was shocked to find that it had increased immensely, it was growing with every minute. She wondered drearily if her stubborn love--the term took its place without remark in the procession of her thoughts--for Gerrit didn't, in spite of her protest to the contrary, stamp her as quite bad. Perhaps her grandfather was right about them all--her mother and Uncle Edward and herself, and they were wicked, lost! The energy with which she had combated this charge now faced by the circumstance of her realized affection for a man married to some one else, even Chinese, wavered. All the cheerful influences of the day, rising to the supreme tranquil hour on the Ammidon porch, sank to dejection; it was like the flight of the rockets.