It was an elaborate, brass bed enclosed on three sides and heaped with bright satin quilts. Megan had been in it all the afternoon of her arrival and all the next day. Now it was morning again. She had wakened to a tumult of birds but they had quieted now and in spite of certain small noises about the house the underlying stillness struck her as remarkable. She moved her arms and legs tentatively and as she held up one arm the white-silk sleeve of a Chinese coat fell back from it, showing an ugly green bruise reaching almost from shoulder to elbow. She examined her hands. They looked veined and tired. She could not distinctly remember how she had got here. Only a vague impression of a station in which throngs of clamoring Chinese were pushed aside to make way for her chair, a closed car with the curtains down where she leaned her head on the shoulder of the lady with the green coat. And they had driven perhaps half an hour, perhaps less. Then she had stepped out before a gate in a red stucco wall, had insisted she could walk and fainted. Since then she had dozed or slept, waking to sip tea brought her by the amah and sometimes by the lady. Now for the first time her head felt clear and the pain in it was almost gone. She turned on one side and looked curiously at the room she was in. It was rather bare. There were a few pieces of blackwood furniture, differing at once from the blackwood pieces of the missionaries by an air of unmistakable sophistication. By the octagon-shaped window, in a dark blue bowl, bloomed a twisted miniature tree bearing translucent yellow Chinese plum flowers. On the wall across from her bed was a hanging painting on brownish silk of two dark, furry monkeys eating orange-red persimmons. Megan looked at this a long time. It was impossible not to feel in sympathy with these monkeys; they pecked at the fruit so absently, they were so distrait, unable to concentrate on anything, forever vaguely and obstinately pursued by some great, mysterious sadness in all things, a sadness that not caperings, malice, nor a full stomach could quite take away. It was a true portrait, delicately executed, precise but summary; it gave character to the whole room, making unimportant the offense of the brass bed, the phonograph and records piled on a table, a gilt clock and candlesticks empty of candles, such as one sees on the mantels of cheaper French hotels. Yes, in spite of these things the room had an appearance of style in the sense that a defective work of art may still have style because whoever created it has been able to set on it the seal of a superior personality.