The classification of a good woman, surely a classification that was now fairly obsolete anyway, disturbed Megan, but she knew he meant it only as testifying that Miss Reed was unquestionably physically pure. She thought perversely of the concubines of General Yen Tso-Chong and wondered if intolerance sometimes fails because even though honorable and vigorous it can often overlook an essential point. Miss Reed made every one miserable. Perhaps the concubines did not. What was the essential point? Megan gave it up. After dinner Megan went to her room early, and read in bed for some time. She had a book of Papini, Perugia's _Peintres Chinois_, and an old book on Jesuit missions in China and Japan full of old engravings. But she could not concentrate on any of them. She wrote a long letter to Bob telling him of her arrival, of the Jacksons, of the episode of the wrecked car. Then she turned off her light. Her open window now was only a square in darkness but it brought her the odor of the night. She wondered if there could really be a difference between this smell and that of rainy nights at home; this too was herby and clear, a new smell, but into the room crept a strong under-taint of fertilizer suggesting sickness and age. It came somewhere from the great plain beginning outside her window, a plain that has supported life for such countless ages one wonders it has any power left to force out a single fresh shoot. Megan, already tired, felt the oppression of such a burden; on her relaxing consciousness the sheer immobility of it pressed heavily, pierced through now by the young, quickening jets of rain. [Illustration: Chapter IV headpiece] CHAPTER IV The next morning early Megan went to her window. The rain had momentarily stopped, but the sky was gray and low and it would surely rain again. Along the muddy road passed the Chinese, pushing heavily laden wheelbarrows or sitting in rickshaws holding bundles bigger than themselves on their laps. Even motor-cars were bulging with mattresses, sewing-machines, stoves, all those possessions which are accepted without thought but which when dragged out of the houses where they belong give such a pitiful exposure of the actual simplicity of our needs. Mr. Jackson was right; the rush for the Settlement had begun. It was Sunday. After breakfast they rode to church in rickshaws, with the hoods up and leather aprons fastened across them by patched-up loops of string. It was raining a little. Megan had never been in a rickshaw before and she did not feel the horror she had anticipated at being pulled along by a human being. The coolie had muscled bare legs and he swayed from side to side with a faint trace of swagger; the odor of garlic he had been eating came cheerily back to her. There was something about the equipage, disreputable as it was, that gave her a feeling of pomp and circumstance not entirely unpleasant.