The dress was soaked right round its checkered middle. The girl touched her burning hair and the tendrils at her ears, wet as if she had been in the sea. She did not mind all that much his wanting to change her; it showed a stake in the outcome. Without change, there was the threat of the colonial dames, their baffled sexlessness, their eternal deplorings, the life is artificial, is artificial. Scheherazades of endless grievance—the No. 1 Boy who took opium, the amah who boiled my pink shantung, the cook who, though recommended by Mildred at Jardine’s, had done something peculiar with the New Zealand lamb.

Hand in hand they slithered down another declivity, then passed singly along a ledge. Mountains parted to admit more mountains, and again the path ran jaggedly ahead at apparent random, as if a child had scored the map. Rocks were jumbled like stale cake: up through your shoes they tingled with noon, and in the worst of them grooves had been chipped so that the beast, or person, might make his way across.

The girl wondered about Sir Cecil, who rode in white, whose white sun helmet, and perhaps breast, were looped with gold; who sought and created such arduous silence in which to hear stirrups chinking, hooves ringing, and the heavy breath of horse and man.

Not necessarily of the prevailing view that to proceed at all was to be in some form of flight, she yet perceived that Sir Cecil might have sought distraction here from possibilities that were almost infinite: a wife, silently aggrieved or harshly vocal; the lack of any wife; bereavement, separation, perversion. Remorse was perhaps expiated, or reflection developed, in these lone exertions. Such things passed in her head like scenery, with (the wife theme being dominant) a shiver of long skirts, a flickering of high-boned collar, and Chinese boys in pale gowns and slippers plying punkahs in darkened rooms. While the rider, erect, deliberate, moved on through vacant summer with something like purity.

Sir Whatsit, the present governor, had been in prison like everybody else. Receptions had now resumed at Government House—tastefully modernized by the Japanese during the governor’s absence, though with the doubtful addition of the pagoda. Invitations arrived tactile with gold, everyone attended. Nobody went to the camp at Stanley, far out at Tai Tam, where names and deaths were scratched around disintegrating walls, along with the calendars of Xs which in their beginning had no known end. No man or woman released from there could get the tongue around such reality. After a lifetime passed in denouncing the artificial, actuality had stunned them trivial forever. The sentences beginning “When we were in Stanley” all ended with the tale of weevils in the rice cake, or the loss of the hoarded shoes. There had been breakdowns since, but not anyone with backbone.