gnant when you suggest that he will one day "get
married." He considers love to be "damned foolishness," and despises
"womanisers." He likes "tarts," has one in most ports of the Atlantic
sea-board, and even writes to a certain Mexican enchantress, who lives
in a nice little room over a nice little shop in a nice little street
in the nice little town of Vera Cruz. What does he write? Frankly I
don't know. What does he say, when he has dressed himself in dazzling
white raiment and goes ashore in Surabaya or Singapore, and sits down
to tea with Japanese girls whose eyes are swollen with belladonna and
whose touch communicates fire? How can I answer?

"George," I say, "what would your mother think?"

George is not communicative. He flicks ash from his cigarette and
picks up a month-old _Reynolds's_. And that is a sufficient answer to
my accusations, though he does not realize it. I, at any rate, have
not the face to upbraid a lonely youth, without home or girl friends
from one year's end to another, when in that same _Reynolds's_ I see
page after page of "cases." If these people swerve, if they break the
tables of the law every week, surely George the Fourth may hold up his
head. You see, in Geordie-land, in the ports of Tyne and Wear, where
George the Fourth was bred, there are many engineers who have been out
in steamers working up and down the China coast, who have had nice
little homes in Hankow, Hong-Kong, or Shanghai, with Japanese wives
all complete. Then when the charter was up, and the steamer came home,
these practical men left homes and wives behind them, and all was just
as before. That is George's dream. "China or Burma coast-trade. That's
the job for me when I get ma tickut." It is useless for a stern
moralist like me to argue, because I feel certain that, being what he
is, he would be entirely wise and right.

What an utter futility is marriage to a sea-going engineer! Here is
my friend McGorren, a hard-working and Christian man. He is chief
of a boat in the Burmese oil trade. His wife is dead; he has three
children, who are being brought up with their cousins in North London.
McGorren has been out East two years. It will be another two years
before he can come home. Where is the morality of this? He has no
home. His little ones grow up strangers to him; they are mothered by a
stranger. He is voteless, yet subject to income tax. He can have no
friendships, no society, no rational enjoyment save reading. No