Now that I am here, I am trying to decide what to do with myself.  At home each day was so full of happy things and the happiest of all was listening for Jack’s merry whistle as he opened the street door every night.  At home there are always demands, big and little, popping in on me which I sometimes resent and yet being free from makes me feel as dismal as a long vacant house with the For Rent sign up, looks.  In this Lotus land there is no must of any kind for the alien, and the only whistles I hear belong to the fierce little tugs that buzz around in the harbor, in and out among the white sails of the fishing fleet like big black beetles in a field of lilies.  But you must not think life dull for me.  Fate and I have cried a truce, and she is showing me a few hands she is dealing other people.  But first listen to the tale I have to tell of the bruise she gave my pride this morning, that will show black for many a day.

I joined a crowd on the water ’s edge in front of the hotel to watch a funeral procession in boats.  Recently a hundred and eighty fishermen were sent to the bottom by a big typhoon, and the wives and the sweethearts were being towed out to sea to pay a last tribute to them, by strewing the fatal spot with flowers and paper prayers.  White-robed priests stood up in the front of the boats and chanted some mournful ritual, keeping time to the dull thumping of a drum.  The air was heavy with incense.  A dreamy melancholy filled the air and I thought how hallowed and beautiful a thing is memory.  From out that silent watching crowd came a voice that sent my thoughts flying to starry nights of long ago and my first trip across the Pacific; soft south winds; vows of eternal devotion that kept time with the distant throbbing of a ship’s engine.  I fumed.  I was facing little Germany and five littler Germanys strung out behind.  You surely remember him? and how when I could n’t see things his way he swore to a wrecked heart and a never-to-be-forgotten constancy.  Mate!  There was no more of a flicker of memory in the stare of his round blue eyes than there would have been in a newly baked pretzel.  I stood still, waiting for some glimmer of recognition.  Instead, he turned to the pincushion on his arm, whom I took to be Ma O., and I heard him say “Herzallorliebsten.”  I went straight to the hotel and had it translated.  Thought it had a familiar sound.  Would n’t it be interesting to know how many “only ones” any man’s life history records?  To think of my imagining him eating his heart out with hopeless longing in some far away Tibetan Monastery.  And here he was, pudgy and content, with his fat little brood waddling along behind him.  If our vision could penetrate the future, verily Romance would have to close up shop.  Oh, no!  I did n’t want him to pine entirely away, but he needn’t have been in such an everlasting hurry to get fat and prosperous over it.  Would n’t Jack howl?