His passion for her began to burn to hatred. He hated her now, with all the instinct of a fair-haired native, for that was what he really was, despite his white skin. For he was his mother's son rather than his father's. Oh, he hated her now, for he had felt his fear of the punishment only for an instant and he ... he had forgotten everything by now! And his one idea was to injure her--how he did not yet know--but to injure her so that she might feel pain and suffer. The process of thinking it over imparted a Satanic gloom to his small, murky soul. Although he did not think about it, he felt unconsciously that she was as though invulnerable; he even felt that she boasted inwardly of her invulnerability and that it made her daily more brazen and indifferent. She was constantly staying at Patjaram, on any excuse that offered. The anonymous letters which Van Oudijck still often showed her no longer disturbed her; she was growing accustomed to them. She returned them to him without a word; once she even forgot them, left them lying about in the back-verandah. Once Theo read them. In a sudden flash of light, due to he knew not what, suddenly he seemed to recognize certain characters, certain strokes. He remembered, in the compound, near Patjaram, the hut, half bamboo, half packing-case-boards, where he and Addie de Luce had been to see Si-Oudijck and the papers hastily raked together by an Arab. He had a vague recollection of seeing those same characters, those strokes, on a scrap of paper on the floor. It passed vaguely and quick as lightning through his head. But it was no more than a lightning-flash. His small, murky soul had room for nothing but dull hatred and troubled calculation. But he had not sense enough to follow out that calculation. He hated his father by instinct and innate antipathy; his mother, because she was a half-caste; his step-mother, because she had finished with him; he hated Addie and Doddie into the bargain; he hated the world, because it made him work. He hated every berth he had ever had: he now hated his office at Surabaya. But he was too lazy and too muddle-headed to do harm. Rack his brains as he might, he could not discover how to harm his father, Addie and Léonie. Everything about him was vague, turbid, dissatisfied, indistinct. The object of his desire was money and a fine woman. Beyond this, he had nothing in him but the dull-witted gloom and discontent of the fat, fair-haired Eurasian that he was. And he continued to brood impotently over his murky thoughts.