e saw.

"Jade," said Ah Cum.

She turned away from the doorway of the silk loom to observe. Pole
coolies came joggling along with bobbing blocks of jade--white
jade, splashed and veined with translucent emerald green.

"On the way to the cutters," said Ah Cum. "But we must be getting
along if we are to lunch in the tower of the water-clock."

As if an order had come to her somewhere out of space, the girl
glanced sideways at the other young fool.

So far she had not heard the sound of his voice. The tail-ender of
this little caravan, he had been rather out of it. But he had shown
no desire for information, no curiosity. Whenever they stepped from
the chairs, he stepped down. If they entered a shop, he paused by
the doorway, as if waiting for the journey to be resumed.

Young, not much older than she was: she was twenty and he was
possibly twenty-four. She liked his face; it had on it the
suggestion of gentleness, of fineness. She was lamentably without
comparisons; such few young men as she had seen--white men--had
been on the beach, pitiful and terrible objects.

The word _handsome_ was a little beyond her grasp. She could not
apply it in this instance because she was not sure the application
would be correct. Perhaps what urged her interest in the young
man's direction was the dead whiteness of his face, the puffed
eyelids and the bloodshot whites. She knew the significance: the
red corpuscle was being burnt out by the fires of alcohol. Was he,
too, on the way to the beach? What a pity! All alone, and none to
warn him of the abject wretchedness at the end of Drink.

Only the night before, in the dining room of the Hong-Kong Hotel,
she had watched him empty glass after glass of whisky, and shudder
and shudder. He did not like it. Why, then, did he touch it?

As he climbed heavily into his chair, she was able to note the
little beads of sweat under the cracked nether lip. He was in
misery; he was paying for last night's debauch. His clothes were
smartly pressed, his linen white, his jaws cleanly shaven; but the
day would come when he would grow indifferent to bodily
cleanliness. What a pity!

For all her ignorance of material things--the human inventions
which served the physical comforts of man--how much she knew about
man himself! She had seen him bereft of all those spiritual props
which permit man to walk on two feet instead of four--broken,
without resilience. And now she was witnessing or observing th