Basil said when she came to him later with a cup of tea—he had slept through tiffin, and she would not have him called—"What about Ah Wong? She knows."
His mother answered him proudly: "I trust Ah Wong. Ah Wong knows, of course—part at least. But it will be always precisely as if she knew nothing."
Basil shrugged skeptically, sitting up among his pillows. And his mother put the tray down and left him a little hurriedly. There is little a woman finds harder to bear than a man's ingratitude. Florence Gregory was ashamed of her son.
She had tiffined early, and before tiffin and since she had been out and about: shopping, paying calls, laughing, chatting, the brightest woman in Hong Kong, the best dressed, and the most care-free. And now she went out again, sitting radiant and chic in her smart chair, carried wherever she would be most seen. She stayed a little at the racquets court and at the cricket club. But she did not leave her chair. She was too tired—almost at the end of her woman's long tether.
