"At about midnight they were in Wing On's establishment. A house of Chinese entertainment, with jugglers, conjurers and dancing girls, and many little stages on which coarse farces were played with much chirping and screaming to the accompaniment of wooden instruments and varied and powerful stenches. The Chinese stood crowded in front of it, bursting with laughter. Paper flowers, lanterns, banners, letters of red and gold and an air so thick it exceeded anything the Russells had hitherto endured. They recovered in a smart little night club in the Settlement where the Chinese, Korean and Japanese girls twirled their partners on a lighted floor of glass. At one o'clock they were in a shabby place not far from the Bund where French sailors danced with Russian girls and Japanese imitations of American drinks were gulped down. At two they were leaving a Chinese hotel where the native crooks took their pleasure, where yellow-skinned gangsters, blackmailers and leaders of thieving gangs with their exceedingly beautiful girls danced the rumba to a Philippine orchestra. Somewhat later they were walking down Foochow Road, Bobbie maintaining himself in a perpendicular position between them with extraordinary ingenuity. Bobbie's condition had its well-marked ups and downs, mountains and valleys of exhilaration and melancholy. Now he had become obstinate and refused to go home. Inebriation produced an urge to self-annihilation in him: he wanted to press on deeper and deeper into the dirt and corruption to which whole quarters of this city were given up.

"Your wife's tired, Bobbie," Frank said at intervals.

"She can go to the devil," Bobbie replied each time.

Frank looked at Helen; she smiled gaily at him, unapproachable and unmoved. Her hair was smooth and shining under the silk of her hat, the maize-yellow dress was without a crease, and her skin looked perfectly fresh. Like fruit, Frank Taylor thought thirstily.

On they went - to the White Chrysanthemums, a Japanese place far out in Chapei, to the Dragon's Cave, where there was only an electrical piano, and to the Flower Boat, a Chinese brothel, where landscapes of the Bavarian Alps hung on the walls, where children turned cartwheels, where there was not a girl over sixteen and not a man was sober.

Towards three o'clock in the morning they rose again from the depths and arrived at Delmonico's, where at this time of day the whole of Shanghai went for scrambled eggs or onion soup. Every shade of race, elegance and intoxication was to be met there.

It was at Delmonico's that Bobble began to storm. At first he sat mute for some time, staring into vacancy over his soup with a fixed smile. "Bobbie," Helen said, touching his sleeve. Suddenly he got up and walked stiffly and in a beeline to a distant table and said to a lean, gray-haired Chinese in a dress coat: "I forbid you to stare at my wife, you Chinese swine."

The Chinese pretended not to have heard and went on talking with the Frenchman at his table. Everybody in the place knew the gentleman in evening dress: he was a man of great importance in the government.

"You swine of a Chinaman!" Bobbie roared so loudly that his voice broke. People turned to look at him. Their faces showed neither astonishment nor annoyance, only that toleration of eccentricities which is second nature in Shanghai.

"Conduct the gentleman into the fresh air, he seems to be suffering," the Chinese in the dress coat said to a waiter, also in dress clothes. The maitre d'hotel, a pale, swarthy, handsome Portuguese, took hold of Bobbie with a jujitsu grip and lugged him outside. The Chinese turned back with a smile to his friends. "How ashamed he will he when he is sober and remembers his behavior," he said with a tolerance that was contempt. "The climate of Shanghai does not always suit the English race very well."

All content is copyright unless otherwise indicated