She turned her head a little. The corridor behind the glass-topped door was crowded with soldiers in gray. One leaned with an air of privilege against the glass. Around his neck he wore a salmon-pink silk cord attached to a Mauser from which hung a salmon-pink silk tassel. The other soldiers carried small bath towels and tin cups. This grander one no doubt was the General's orderly. Megan turned to the window, trying to raise her head a little, and the amah at once lifted her, supporting her against a cool linen shoulder. The train was cutting across a land spread out in the greenness of young rice and mulberries beginning to leaf, a land webbed with canals bringing water to the endless fields, on whose muddy shallows fringed with water hyacinths the laden, unhurried processions of sampans wove great slow patterns of movement about the arrow-like flight of the train. The train passed relentlessly the small half-naked men carrying loads swung from their shoulders, who stepped with the jogging trot of the heavily burdened along stone trails already pressed deep into the sod by the weight and weariness of endless feet. A hill rose and disappeared, carrying on its crest a pagoda, an unstable shape of inverted bell-flowers stacked one on top of another, surely a deliberate note of the purest frivolity against the fatigue, the solemn fertility of the land. Megan closed her eyes and the amah gently let her slip back on the seat. She opened her eyes to be sure that nothing had changed, for already the train, the General, the lady, the door against which leaned the orderly with the pink-silk cord, the window opening into China, had become the accepted reality to which she clung. She tried to stay awake. The General leaned back, blowing smoke rings, looking up meditatively at the ceiling; the lady sat beside him, silent because he did not wish to talk, but with an air of readiness as though her own possible meditations were held only at his pleasure, never quite losing, even when he was not looking at her, the lightly seductive smile with which she turned to him when he spoke or even made a movement.