"No, I can only imagine you rescuing them in the orthodox manner." But the truth was she did not want to imagine Bates in China at all, and it was a matter of complete indifference to her what he did or did not do. In the lobby he tried to persuade her to go on to some other place with him. There was a Russian club just outside the Settlement where they had real vodka and served the meat on a bayonet, and another place where they had a roulette wheel. He was like a child in his desire for entertainment and in his dependence on some one else for it. He was even dependent on Megan now that they had had dinner and a few drinks together. But she would not stay. When he deposited her at the house she found Mrs. Jackson sitting up for her. "Did you have a nice time?" she asked. Megan admitted that she wished she had not gone. In her own room she decided to have a bath and turned on the water so that the little bathroom was a cage of steam. She had an idea of washing away the unpleasant impression the evening had left with her, but in the tub she felt more depressed than ever. Clothes are more of a protection to us than we realize until we take them off. When we take off our clothes we take away at the same time all the evidences of the rôle we have chosen; we are very apt to lose our dignity and even our purpose, and for the moment to sink tack into an indistinguishable humanity. Megan lay in the warm water feeling that this poor stripped creature that was herself was not worthy of her vocation. In her bed she propped up the pillows and picking up the account of the early Jesuit Missions ruffled the pages back and forth, thinking of the view she had just had of the European excrescence on China. It was obvious that white Shanghai must be chiefly composed of homes full of honest citizens like any other city, like Indianapolis, like Dijon, like Brighton, probably as nearly like them as it could possibly be made. But the dulness of the entertainment she had taken part in was doubly dull, seen as a transplanted thing, just as the stoves and sewing-machines of the refugees had seemed particularly pitiful as things one felt compelled to drag with one from place to place.