“I ought to feel flattered.  I will confess to you that I felt only half disguised and was half angry and wholly uncomfortable.  What helped me, I suppose, was that I wanted to please. . . .”

“I don’t mean to say that they were exactly pleased,” broke in Lingard, conscientiously.  “They were startled more.”

“I wanted to please you,” dropped Mrs. Travers, negligently.  A faint, hoarse, and impatient call of a bird was heard from the woods as if calling to the oncoming night.  Lingard’s face grew hot in the deepening dusk.  The delicate lemon yellow and ethereal green tints had vanished from the sky and the red glow darkened menacingly.  The sun had set behind the black pall of the forest, no longer edged with a line of gold.  “Yes, I was absurdly self-conscious,” continued Mrs. Travers in a conversational tone.  “And it was the effect of these clothes that you made me put on over some of my European—­I almost said disguise; because you know in the present more perfect costume I feel curiously at home; and yet I can’t say that these things really fit me.  The sleeves of this silk under-jacket are rather tight.  My shoulders feel bound, too, and as to the sarong it is scandalously short.  According to rule it should have been long enough to fall over my feet.  But I like freedom of movement.  I have had very little of what I liked in life.”

“I can hardly believe that,” said Lingard.  “If it wasn’t for your saying so. . . .”

“I wouldn’t say so to everybody,” she said, turning her head for a moment to Lingard and turning it away again to the dusk which seemed to come floating over the black lagoon.  Far away in its depth a couple of feeble lights twinkled; it was impossible to say whether on the shore or on the edge of the more distant forest.  Overhead the stars were beginning to come out, but faint yet, as if too remote to be reflected in the lagoon.  Only to the west a setting planet shone through the red fog of the sunset glow.  “It was supposed not to be good for me to have much freedom of action.  So at least I was told.  But I have a suspicion that it was only unpleasing to other people.”

“I should have thought,” began Lingard, then hesitated and stopped.  It seemed to him inconceivable that everybody should not have loved to make that woman happy.  And he was impressed by the bitterness of her tone.  Mrs. Travers did not seem curious to know what he wanted to say and after a time she added, “I don’t mean only when I was a child.  I don’t remember that very well.  I daresay I was very objectionable as a child.”

Lingard tried to imagine her as a child.  The idea was novel to him.  Her perfection seemed to have come into the world complete, mature, and without any hesitation or weakness.  He had nothing in his experience that could help him to imagine a child of that class.  The children he knew played about the village street and ran on the beach.  He had been one of them.  He had seen other children,