no less shamelessly than their women. He
was always uncomfortable in the company of the army men. They seemed
uncomfortable, too. And he felt, always, that they were laughing at him
up their sleeves, or pitying him, or tolerating him. Then, too, they
seemed, by mere contiguity, to emphasize a lack in him, to call attention
to that in them which he did not possess and which he thanked God he did
not possess. Faugh! They were like their women!

In fact, Percival Ford was no more a woman's man than he was a man's man.
A glance at him told the reason. He had a good constitution, never was
on intimate terms with sickness, nor even mild disorders; but he lacked
vitality. His was a negative organism. No blood with a ferment in it
could have nourished and shaped that long and narrow face, those thin
lips, lean cheeks, and the small, sharp eyes. The thatch of hair, dust-
coloured, straight and sparse, advertised the niggard soil, as did the
nose, thin, delicately modelled, and just hinting the suggestion of a
beak. His meagre blood had denied him much of life, and permitted him to
be an extremist in one thing only, which thing was righteousness. Over
right conduct he pondered and agonized, and that he should do right was
as necessary to his nature as loving and being loved were necessary to
commoner clay.

He was sitting under the algaroba trees between the _lanai_ and the
beach. His eyes wandered over the dancers and he turned his head away
and gazed seaward across the mellow-sounding surf to the Southern Cross
burning low on the horizon. He was irritated by the bare shoulders and
arms of the women. If he had a daughter he would never permit it, never.
But his hypothesis was the sheerest abstraction. The thought process had
been accompanied by no inner vision of that daughter. He did not see a
daughter with arms and shoulders. Instead, he smiled at the remote
contingency of marriage. He was thirty-five, and, having had no personal
experience of love, he looked upon it, not as mythical, but as bestial.
Anybody could marry. The Japanese and Chinese coolies, toiling on the
sugar plantations and in the rice-fields, married. They invariably
married at the first opportunity. It was because they were so low in the
scale of life. There was nothing else for them to do. They were like
the army men and women. But for him there were other and higher things.
He was different from them--from all of them. He was prou