’I suppose you think it is a story that you can imagine for yourselves.  We have heard so many such stories, and the majority of us don’t believe them to be stories of love at all.  For the most part we look upon them as stories of opportunities:  episodes of passion at best, or perhaps only of youth and temptation, doomed to forgetfulness in the end, even if they pass through the reality of tenderness and regret.  This view mostly is right, and perhaps in this case too. . . .  Yet I don’t know.  To tell this story is by no means so easy as it should be—­were the ordinary standpoint adequate.  Apparently it is a story very much like the others:  for me, however, there is visible in its background the melancholy figure of a woman, the shadow of a cruel wisdom buried in a lonely grave, looking on wistfully, helplessly, with sealed lips.  The grave itself, as I came upon it during an early morning stroll, was a rather shapeless brown mound, with an inlaid neat border of white lumps of coral at the base, and enclosed within a circular fence made of split saplings, with the bark left on.  A garland of leaves and flowers was woven about the heads of the slender posts—­and the flowers were fresh.

’Thus, whether the shadow is of my imagination or not, I can at all events point out the significant fact of an unforgotten grave.  When I tell you besides that Jim with his own hands had worked at the rustic fence, you will perceive directly the difference, the individual side of the story.  There is in his espousal of memory and affection belonging to another human being something characteristic of his seriousness.  He had a conscience, and it was a romantic conscience.  Through her whole life the wife of the unspeakable Cornelius had no other companion, confidant, and friend but her daughter.  How the poor woman had come to marry the awful little Malacca Portuguese—­after the separation from the father of her girl—­and how that separation had been brought about, whether by death, which can be sometimes merciful, or by the merciless pressure of conventions, is a mystery to me.  From the little which Stein (who knew so many stories) had let drop in my hearing, I am convinced that she was no ordinary woman.  Her own father had been a white; a high official; one of the brilliantly endowed men who are not dull enough to nurse a success, and whose careers so often end under a cloud.  I suppose she too must have lacked the saving dullness—­and her career ended in Patusan.  Our common fate . . . for where is the man—­I mean a real sentient man—­who does not remember vaguely having been deserted in the fullness of possession by some one or something more precious than life? . . . our common fate fastens upon the women with a peculiar cruelty.  It does not punish like a master, but inflicts lingering torment, as if to gratify a secret, unappeasable spite.  One would think that, appointed to rule on earth, it seeks to revenge itself upon the beings that come nearest to rising above