“I must dance with this bum. He’s one of the ‘influential patrons,’ and the management would have a fit and bounce me if I turned him down. I’ll be back after he’s walked a mile on my feet.” The two men watched her as she steered the lumbering mestizo through the crowd. Neither of them spoke. At the end of the dance she returned to the table and sat down as a matter of course. This was the Orient, and a long way from home and its standards of caste. And these Americans had been decent to her--kind to her. “Ain’t it fierce, to have to dance with a man that’s a hop toad and an elephant all in one?” she inquired with a passing annoyance. “Know the game? Sure I know the game--and a darned good thing I do!” she continued, taking up the conversation where they had left it. “I’ve known it since I was a kid. I’m twenty-three now; and I’ve been thanking my stars all that time that I knew it. You put yourself through the China Coast, and you need to know the ropes of life. You think I’d want to be one of those sweet, innocent dunces that you men always like to believe we blondes are--and that we aren’t, so many times? I’d have fallen into the paws of a Chink--I would! Innocent sweetness can’t come through the China Coast whole, and don’t you forget it! I’ve walked straight, but it wasn’t by being sweet and innocent that I did it. It was by knowing every devilment that men can be up to. They are all alike--the men I meet. Their skins are different colours, but their ideas are the same. All yellow inside, and black and brown and white outside.” Musingly, she sipped her soda water. In this repose her mouth showed hard lines in crescents at the corners. There were wrinkles raying out from her eyes--baby eyes, at times. These eyes now turned contritely to the two officers. “That was hitting below the belt, wasn’t it? My turn to apologize now! But it isn’t often I meet fellows like you--fellows who’ll talk to me instead of wanting to paw me--guys who are drunk, and----” Her voice trailed off. She stared unseeingly at the crowd as it pranced past the table. “God! I don’t blame men for the way things are with us girls! If I was a man I’d play the game that way, too, I guess. They haven’t got a thing staked on the turn of the wheel. But we’ve got everything to lose. And if we aren’t careful we lose it; that’s all.” The wind came up again and tore at the house, and around the house, with concentrated enmity. It played with the loose shell windows as the cat with the mouse. Inspired by this lack of control in the elements, Kirwin became elemental in his questioning of the girl. “Born and brought up in New York, on Eighth Avenue, you say? Then why out here?”