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ease. Her elegance and her foreign beauty, which had charmed them a moment earlier, began to awe
them a little. Even Flory was conscious of the same feeling. There came one of those dreadful
moments that one has with Orientals, when everyone avoids everyone else’s eyes, trying vainly to
think of something to say. Then the naked child, which had been exploring some baskets at the back of
the shop, crawled across to where the Europeans sat. It examined their shoes and stockings with great
curiosity, and then, looking up, saw their white faces and was seized with terror. It let out a desolate
wail, and began making water on the floor.
The old Chinese woman looked up, clicked her tongue and went on rolling cigarettes. No one else
took the smallest notice. A pool began to form on the floor. Elizabeth was so horrified that she set her
cup down hastily and spilled the tea. She plucked at Flory’s arm.
‘That child! Do look what it’s doing! Really, can’t someone–it’s too awful!’
For a moment everyone gazed in astonishment, and then they all grasped what was the matter. There
was a flurry and a general clicking of tongues. No one had paid any attention to the child–the incident
was too normal to be noticed–and now they all felt horribly ashamed. Everyone began putting the
blame on the child. There were exclamations of ‘What a disgraceful child! What a disgusting child!’
The old Chinese woman carried the child, still howling, to the door, and held it out over the step as
though wringing out a bath sponge. And in the same moment, as it seemed, Flory and Elizabeth were
outside the shop, and he was following her back to the road with Li Yeik and the others looking after
them in dismay.
‘If that’s what you call civilised people——!’ she was exclaiming.
‘I’ m sorry,’ he said feebly. ‘I never expected——’
‘What absolutely disgusting people!’
She was bitterly angry. Her face had flushed a wonderful delicate pink, like a poppy bud opened a
day too soon. It was the deepest colour of which it was capable. He followed her past the bazaar and
back to the main road, and they had gone fifty yards before he ventured to speak again.
‘I’m so sorry that this should have happened! Li Yeik is such a decent old chap. He’d hate to think
that he’d offended you. Really it would have been better to stay a few minutes. Just to thank him for
the tea.’
‘Thank him! After that!’
‘But honestly, you oughtn’t to mind that sort of thing. Not in this country. These people’s whole
outlook is so different from ours. One has to adjust oneself. Suppose, for instance, you were back in
the Middle Ages——’
‘I think I’d rather not discuss it any longer.’
It was the first time they had definitely quarrelled. He was too miserable even to ask himself how it
was that he offended her. He did not realise that this constant striving to interest her in Oriental things
struck her only as perverse, ungentlemanly, a deliberate seeking after the squalid and the ‘beastly’. He
had not grasped even now with what eyes she saw the ‘natives’. He only knew that at each attempt to
make her share his life, his thoughts, his sense of beauty, she shied away from him like a frightened
horse.