And she had in her that play and counterplay of seeking and thinking in order to find her way, now that she was quite lost in a country alien to her nature, among people on whom she looked down, without letting them perceive it. She strove to find the good in the country, in order to make it her own and cherish it; she was glad to find among the people those few who roused her sympathy and her admiration; but the good remained incidental to her, the few people remained exceptional; and, despite all her seeking and thinking, she did not find her way and retained the moodiness of a woman who was too European, too artistic, notwithstanding her self-knowledge and her consequent denial of her artistic capacity, to live quietly and contentedly in an up-country Javanese town, beside a husband wrapped up in his office-work, in a climate that upset her health, amid natural surroundings that overwhelmed her and among people whom she disliked. And, in the most lucid moments of this play and counterplay, there was the obvious fear, the fear which she felt most definitely of all, the fear which she felt slowly approaching, she knew not whence, she knew not whither, but hovering over her head as with the thousand veils of a fate gliding through the sultry, rain-laden skies.... In these inharmonious moods, she had refrained from gathering her little clique around her, for she herself did not care to take the trouble and her friends did not understand her well enough to seek her out. They missed the cheerfulness in her which had attracted them at first. Envy and hostility were now given more rein; people began to speak freely of her: she was affected, pedantic, vain, proud; she had the pretention always to aim at being the leading person in the town; she behaved just as though she were the resident's wife and ordered every one about. She was not really pretty, she had an impossible way of dressing, her house was preposterously arranged. And then her relation with Van Helderen, their evening walks to the light-house! Ida heard about it at Tosari, amid the band of gossips at the small, poky hotel, where the visitors are bored when they are not going on excursions and therefore sit about in their poky little verandahs, almost in one another's pockets, peeping into one another's rooms, listening at the thin partitions; Ida heard about it at Tosari and it was enough to rouse the little Indian woman's instincts, the instincts of a white half-caste, and induce her suddenly, without stating any cause, to remove her children from Eva's charge. Van Helderen, when he went up for the week-end, asked his wife for an explanation, asked her why she insulted Eva by taking the children away, without a reason, and having them up in the hills, thus increasing the hotel-bills. Ida made a scene, talking loudly, with hysterics that rang through the little hotel, made all the visitors prick up their ears and, like a gale of wind, whipped the cackling chatter into a storm. And,