fathers had been German or
English; I met Dyak girls whose fathers had been Dutch; and Javanese
girls whose fathers had been either American, English or Dutch.

I stayed with such a woman in a home in Borneo. She had been a Dyak
girl. Yet she did not look it. She had a beautiful home with beautiful
English speaking children. I met her in the interior of Borneo a hundred
miles from a single white woman. And yet in this far interior; living
with her English husband who was the head of a mining project; she was
keeping intact the English education of her children. There was a piano
and the children played beautifully while the mother, in a rich
contralto voice sang.

She was graceful, accomplished, beautiful, poised and sweet.

One night as we walked alone under the moonlight the Englishman opened
his heart to me and said, "You are going to visit the Head-Hunting Dyaks
to-morrow. You will see their abject squalor and filth. You will be
surprised when I tell you that my wife was a Dyak girl and that I took
her out of a Kampong fifteen years ago and took her to England."

"That's a lie!" I exclaimed.

"It is the truth!" he added.

Somehow his statement angered me. I don't know why. Perhaps it was the
unusual heat of the tropics. We were directly on the Equator. I would
have fought him for that statement.

But it was true.

"And the hell of it was that when I took her to England she was not
happy and my people would not receive her. So we have had to come back
to Borneo and live our lives in this fashion, far from civilization."

He was silent for a few minutes.

"That is the fate of mixing bloods in these tropical lands," he said
with a shudder. "And the woman always suffers more than the man!"

I met another Malay-English girl on the ship going from Singapore to
Batavia, Java.

She too was an educated, English-speaking girl of a strange beauty and
fascination. She started to talk with me as I sat alone on the Dutch
ship. We were the only English-speaking people on board and we felt a
certain comradeship. We sat an entire evening talking about the problem
of a girl of mixed blood in the Malay States.

"White men always assume that we are bad girls. They come into the
offices where we work as stenographers and insult us. It is that taint
of mixed blood. We have the longings and the ideals of the best blood
that is in our veins; but the skin and the color and the passions of the
worst. We try to be good; some o