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While Vera lit the oil-lamp Matthew stood uncertainly beside her with his hands in his pockets, touched by the simplicity of her home. When there was enough light to see each other by they both felt embarrassed. To conceal her shyness Vera began to rummage unnecessarily in her handbag. Matthew gazed at the pictures torn from magazines which were pinned to the partition by the bed: there was a picture of someone whom he supposed must be the last Tsar of Russia, looking very hairy, and another of King George VI and another of Myrna Loy. He sat down on the bed beside which there was a pile of movie magazines and some books. Three or four of the books were in Chinese (among them, though he did not know it, a treatise on sexual techniques, for Vera took such matters seriously); there was a copy of Self-Help indented with the stamp of the American Missionary Society, Harbin, and a tattered collection of other books in English, including Waley’s 170 Chinese Poems, once the property of the United Services Club and Percy F. Westerman’s To the Fore with the Tanks, much scribbled on in red pencil by a child.

Vera sat down on the bed beside him. She no longer experienced the slippery sensation she had felt before and which she usually felt when aroused. Concerned with the impression that her room might be making on her visitor the flow of her yin essences had declined to a trickle. She sensed, too, that Matthew’s yang force had also been diverted into another channel and now lacked the fierce concentration of the unbridled yang spirit.

Indeed, Matthew, sitting quietly in this dimly lit cubicle, not much bigger, he supposed, than the closet where a man like Walter Blackett would hang his suits, was again brooding on the question of property and wondering whether it was possible to be wealthy and yet to live a just life. For, in a competitive society, how could you be wealthy in a vacuum? Were you not wealthy against other people poorer than you? No matter how justly you tried to behave, and did behave, no matter how honest and charitable and sympathetic to suffering, did not this possession of wealth, which allowed you to go to the opera and drink fine wines now and then, which made your experience of life less harsh in almost every way, cast a subtle blight over all your aspirations? Could someone live justly in Tanglin while at the same time people lived in this wretched tenement riddled with malnutrition and tuberculosis (he could still hear that weary, relentless coughing through the partitions)? This question was quite apart from the fact that the man coughing had been sucked into Malaya by the great implosion of British capital invested in cheap tropical land and labour, for it could certainly be strongly argued that he was a beneficiary rather than the victim of British enterprise, including that of Blackett and Webb among others. He put a comforting arm round Vera’s shoulders, thinking that she must not stay here to catch tuberculosis from her neighbours and at the same time wondering how one should behave in order to live justly.

Vera, meanwhile, with Matthew’s arm around her had begun to feel slippery again, so that presently, if you had tried to grasp her, she would have sprung out of your fingers like a bar of soap in the bathtub. She wriggled closer and put an arm around his waist. This, in turn, had a certain effect on Matthew for the monkey soup had not ceased to flow richly in his veins. The yang spirit, which had been dozing like a tiger in its cave, was abruptly awoken by that lithe yet slippery arm which had encircled his waist: now it came snarling out of its lair, determined to be satiated, come what might.

Without receiving conscious instructions from their owner, Matthew’s hands began to wander over Vera’s clothes and in due course found some buttons. But the buttons proved to be ornamental and so, after a considerable interval of pulling and tugging which was plainly getting his hands nowhere, Vera