They passed the entrance to the Avenue Joffre, going along the road edging the Settlement, to the Avenue Haig. On their left heavy coils of barbed wire shut out a few mean Chinese houses, a large Chinese building behind a brick wall, with an institutional look about it, farther on making a barrier to dreamlike vistas of water-soaked fields, canals, and low Chinese farmhouses with roofs horned like the new moon. They turned to the right at the side of a large riding-school with paddocks and an enclosed ring. A huge tow-haired Russian groom was leading a horse from the ring. The church was bare. Only Europeans were there, and they got up, sat down, made the responses with what seemed a determination wearier but more dogged than it would have been at home. "'Let me never be confounded," sang the choirboys in their white, reedy voices. In the afternoon Mr. Jackson went off to try to persuade Miss Reed for the last time to evacuate the orphanage. Mrs. Jackson expressed the belief that he would not succeed. "I wish Doctor Strike were here," she said to Megan. "He could make her do it. But Will never can; he is afraid of her." She added that Doctor Strike might be expected at any moment now, and every time the telephone or the door-bell rang she said, "That is probably the Doctor now." But he did not come. The afternoon passed interminably to Megan. She longed to be out helping Mr. Jackson evacuate the orphanage. She envied Miss Reed, who at least was in the midst of the storm. It was so hard sitting still and watching Mrs. Jackson knit, trying to talk to her. After she had shown Mrs. Jackson her trousseau, which Mrs. Jackson evidently found much too plain, and had answered a few questions of "what they wore" at home, they really had nothing to say to each other. Toward the one subject on which Megan tried to draw her out Mrs. Jackson maintained an evasiveness that had a flavor of positive resistance. In her rambling sentences she would sometimes mention casually and without explanation, as if every one must have heard of them, such persons as Doctor Strike, Mrs. Walsh at the Socony Installation, Miss Reed, her amah who was devoted to her, but she could not be induced to talk about China. She had not a trace of intellectual curiosity. If there were things in the world mysterious and a little terrifying, she would refuse to be either mystified or terrified, she would blank them off. And China she ignored as if it had been an obscene fact of life, like sex. Megan tried to imagine her sitting for the last twenty years in a Chinese house, eating Chinese food, speaking Chinese and ignoring China. Seeing Megan was restless, Mrs. Jackson asked her if she cared about reading, and when Megan answered that she did, Mrs. Jackson went up-stairs and returned with a book. "I find this very helpful," she said, handing it to Megan.