a sign of it.

A drunken idea, Ah Cum had called it. And yet it was basically a
fine action. To buy the freedom of a poor little Chinese slave-girl!
For what was the sing-song girl but a slave, the double slave of
custom and of men? Ruth wanted to know keenly what had impelled the
idea. Had he been trying to stop the grim descent, and had he dimly
perceived that perhaps a fine deed would serve as the initial
barrier? A drunken idea--a pearl in the midst of a rubbish heap.
That terrible laughter, just before his senses had left him!

Why? Here was a word that volleyed at her from all directions,
numbed and bewildered her: the multiple echoes of her own first
utterance of the word. Why wasn't the world full of love, when love
made happiness? Why did people hide their natural kindliness as if
it were something shameful? Why shouldn't people say what they
thought and act as they were inclined? Why all this pother about
what one's neighbour thought, when this pother was not energized by
any good will? Why was truth avoided as the plague? Why did this
young man have one name on the hotel register and another on his
lips? Why was she bothering about him at all? Why should there be
this inexplicable compassion, when the normal sensation should have
been repellance? Sidney Carton. Was that it? Had she clothed this
unhappy young man with glamour? Or was it because he was so alone?
She could not get through the husks to the kernel of what really
actuated her.

Somewhere in the world would be his people, perhaps his mother; and
it might soften the bitterness, of the return to consciousness if
he found a woman at his bedside. More than this, it would serve to
mitigate her own abysmal loneliness to pool it temporarily with
his.

She drew up a chair and sat down, putting her palm on the damp,
cold forehead. A bad sign; it signified that the heart action was
in a precarious state. So far he had not stirred; from his
bloodless lips had come no sound.

At length the manager arrived; and together he and Ruth succeeded
in getting some of the aromatic spirits of ammonia down the
patient's throat. But nothing followed to indicate that the liquid
had stimulated the heart.

"You see?" Ruth said.

The manager conceded that he saw, that his original diagnosis was
at fault. Superimposed was the agitating thought of what would
follow the death of this unwelcome guest: confusion, poking
authorities, British and American red tape. It wou