The young wife, very European, now in India for the first time, had never known, before her two years at Labuwangi, that it was possible to work as hard as her husband did, in a country as hot as Labuwangi was during the eastern moonson. She had resisted it at first; she had at first tried to stand upon her rights; but once she saw that he really had not a minute to spare, she waived them. She had very soon come to realize that her husband could not share her life, nor could she share his: not because he was not a good husband and very fond of his wife, but simply because the post brought two hundred letters and documents daily. She had soon seen that there was nothing for her to do at Labuwangi and that she would have to console herself with her house and, later, with her child. She arranged her house as a temple of art and comfort and racked her brains over the education of her little boy. She was an artistically cultivated woman and came from an artistic environment. Her father was Van Hove, the great landscape-painter; her mother was Stella Couberg, the famous concert-singer. Eva, brought up in an artistic and musical home whose atmosphere she had breathed since her babyhood, in her picture-books and childish songs, Eva had married an East-Indian civil servant and had accompanied him to Labuwangi. She loved her husband, a good-looking Frisian and a man of sufficient culture to take an interest in many subjects. And she had gone, happy in her love and filled with illusions about India and all the Orientalism of the tropics. And she had tried to preserve her illusions, despite the warnings which she had received. At Singapore she was struck by the colour of the naked Malays, like that of a bronze statue, by the Eastern motley of the Chinese and Arab quarters and the poetry of the Japanese tea-houses, which unfolded like a page of Loti as she drove past. But, soon after, in Batavia, a grey disappointment had fallen like a cold, drizzling rain upon her expectation of seeing everything in India as a beautiful fairy-tale, a story out of the Arabian Nights. The habits of their narrow, everyday existence damped all her unsophisticated longing to admire; and she saw everything that was ridiculous even before she discovered anything else that was beautiful. At her hotel, the men in pyjamas lay at full length in their deck-chairs, with their lazy legs on the extended leg-rests, their feet--although carefully tended--bare and their toes moving quietly in a conscientious exercise of big toe and little toe, even while she was passing. The ladies were in sarong and kabaai, the only practical morning-dress, which is easily changed two or three times a day, but which suits so few, the straight, pillow-case outline at the back being peculiarly angular and ugly, however elegant and expensive the costume.... And then the commonplace aspect of the houses, with all their whitewash and their rows of fragile and meretricious