“Do you know Soerabaya? No? It was there I saw them. I had known Dorrien long ago somewhere. There wasn’t much of any one else in that crazy thing that called itself a hotel--kept by a Portuguese Jew named D’Acunha. It was in the town, mind you, not in the suburbs, and the guests ran accordingly. Very good drinks, and plenty of mosquito-netting, but everything else in the place that mosquito-netting wouldn’t keep out. Mrs. Dorrien always dressed for dinner, I remember. Dorrien wasn’t happy. She had come to please him, though just why to Soerabaya I never made out, and was always reminding him of it, and he wasn’t pleased. They had left the little girl at home, and I dare say the mother wanted to get back to her. She kept saying she was afraid Aunt Emma wouldn’t have Virginia’s teeth properly straightened. Wonderful thing a woman is! Lizards climbing all round over the walls, and the eternal promise of a snake coiling up on the tail of her dress, and she’ll look past it all with her far-sighted eyes and say she is afraid a safe little kid at home with steam-heat and a governess isn’t having her teeth straightened. “I didn’t come in on the Dorriens’ affairs at all at first, you understand. I was there on my own business, and I supposed they were. At least I supposed he was. I never could see what she got out of it: I’ll swear she never looked at scenery, and there wasn’t anything in the mucky little bazaars she wanted. Apparently they had no letters to European residents; or if they had, they didn’t use them. If ever a woman wasn’t meant for the tropics--” His voice trailed off for a little, then boomed out again, softly resonant, like a ship’s gong going intermittently somewhere beyond in the offing. “I admired her more than a little. But I saw that Dorrien had no show. Women are apt to shout with the majority. How is a husband going to be a majority, if he takes a line of his own? Oh, Dorrien was down and out from the start. “They must have been worrying along in Soerabaya for two weeks. I think Dorrien stayed on like a cross child who knows he’s got to go home. He drags at his nurse’s hand, and asks questions about every object they pass. He wasn’t interested in the place, but at least it wasn’t a P. & O. port. He saw perfectly that the next stop would be. If I had had him alone, I could have amused him. Dorrien was the sort that finds an absorbing interest in native--eh--customs, and that sort of thing. But his wife naturally didn’t care about--sociology. She wandered around under the teaks and tamarinds, waiting for his last shadow of an excuse to fade out utterly. When he couldn’t chuck the bluff any more, she’d have him, and she knew it. She’d march him home.