Two days later she was at Batavia. She hardly knew the city; she had been there once or twice, years ago, when she first came out. At Labuwangi, in that little, outlying district, Batavia had gradually become glorified in her imagination into an essentially Eurasian capital, a centre of Eurasian civilization, a dim vision of stately avenues and squares, surrounded by great, wealthy, porticoed villas, thronged with smart carriages and horses. She had always heard so much about Batavia.... She was now staying with friends. The husband was at the head of a big commercial firm; their house was one of the handsomest villas on the Koningsplein. And she had at once been very strangely impressed by the funereal character, by the deadly melancholy of this great town of villas, where thousands of varied lives are waging a silent, feverish battle for a future of moneyed repose. It was as though all those houses, gloomy despite their white pillars and their grand fronts, were frowning like faces careworn with troubles that sought to hide themselves behind a pretentious display of broad leaves and clustering palms. The houses, however much exposed, amidst their pillars, however seemingly open, remained closed; the occupants were never seen. Only in the mornings, as she went on her errands along the shops in Rijswijk and Molenvliet, which, with a few French names among them, tried to give the impression of a southern shopping-centre, of European luxury, Eva would see the exodus to the Old Town of the white men, white-faced, dressed in white; and even their eyes seemed pale with brooding anxieties, fixed upon a future which they all calculated in so many decades or lustres: so much made, in this year or that; and then away, away home from India to Europe. It was as though it were not malaria that was undermining them, but another fever; and she felt clearly that it was undermining their unacclimatized constitutions, their souls, as though they were trying to skip that day and reach the to-morrow, or the day after, days which brought them a little nearer to their goal, because they secretly feared to die before that goal was attained. The exodus filled the trams with its white burden of mortality. Many, already well off, but not yet rich enough for their purpose, drove in their victorias or buggies to the Harmonie Club and there took the tram, to spare their horses.