a shack," he told Ethel.
"We can't go on living here."

Brevald's bungalow was so small that they were all piled on one another,
and there was no chance of ever being alone. There was neither peace nor
privacy.

"Well, there's no hurry. We shall be all right here till we find just
what we want."

It took him a week to get settled and then he entered the firm of a man
called Bain. But when he talked to Ethel about moving she said she
wanted to stay where she was till her baby was born, for she was
expecting another child. Lawson tried to argue with her.

"If you don't like it," she said, "go and live at the hotel."

He grew suddenly pale.

"Ethel, how can you suggest that!"

She shrugged her shoulders.

"What's the good of having a house of our own when we can live here."

He yielded.

When Lawson, after his work, went back to the bungalow he found it
crowded with natives. They lay about smoking, sleeping, drinking _kava_;
and they talked incessantly. The place was grubby and untidy. His child
crawled about, playing with native children, and it heard nothing spoken
but Samoan. He fell into the habit of dropping into the hotel on his
way home to have a few cocktails, for he could only face the evening and
the crowd of friendly natives when he was fortified with liquor. And all
the time, though he loved her more passionately than ever, he felt that
Ethel was slipping away from him. When the baby was born he suggested
that they should get into a house of their own, but Ethel refused. Her
stay in Scotland seemed to have thrown her back on her own people, now
that she was once more among them, with a passionate zest, and she
turned to her native ways with abandon. Lawson began to drink more.
Every Saturday night he went to the English Club and got blind drunk.

He had the peculiarity that as he grew drunk he grew quarrelsome and
once he had a violent dispute with Bain, his employer. Bain dismissed
him, and he had to look out for another job. He was idle for two or
three weeks and during these, sooner than sit in the bungalow, he
lounged about in the hotel or at the English Club, and drank. It was
more out of pity than anything else that Miller, the German-American,
took him into his office; but he was a business man, and though Lawson's
financial skill made him valuable, the circumstances were such that he
could hardly refuse a smaller salary than he had had before, and Miller
did not hesitate to offer it to him