A Most Immoral Woman Read Online Free PDF Page A

could be powerfully persuasive. He almost believed himself.

In Which We Find That Miss Perkins Shares
Morrison’s Missionary Position and, Following
Talk of War, Geishas and Small Feet, a Form of
Exercise Is Proposed
    As they seated themselves by the hearth with their coffees, Dumas accidentally set Mrs Ragsdale off on an exposition on her health, alarming in its thoroughness. Her constitution was evidently more delicate than her sturdy architecture suggested. Miss Perkins, plainly familiar with the topic, nodded sympathetically but distantly, playing all the while with the ribbons on her skirt. She managed to appear both bored and charming.
    The Victorian in Morrison found Mrs Ragsdale’s catalogue of complaints vulgar. If he was also wont to dwell on his own indispositions, at least he did so in private—most of the time, anyway. But his focus was elsewhere. Much attracted to the maiden preening on the chaise before him, he feared that she considered him but some vainglorious and avuncular figure. To presume more might lead to the sort of humiliation that he did not need on a day that had begun with rheumatic pains and the discovery of incipient jowls. And yet there was that mostinteresting business with the pheasant. He could not help but wonder if there was a message there for him.
    Just as Mrs Ragsdale blessedly ran out of steam on the subject of her maladies, an American missionary couple entered the drawing room and made a beeline for their party. Morrison’s heart sank. He had taken tea in Reverend Nisbet’s grim parlour soon after settling in Peking seven years earlier. He would never forget his first sight of the anaemic Mrs Nisbet, perched on a comfortless armchair underneath an engraving of The Soul’s Awakening by James Sant. With an expression eerily parallel to that of Sant’s rapture-stricken subject, and in a voice as thin as her own neck, she avowed that she had never felt the Lord so near to her as in China. She had urged Morrison to join their prayer meetings. Though he came from a God-fearing family and carried with him a thumbnail-sized book of psalms his sister had given him, Morrison was not enamoured of the Church. He had avoided the Nisbets ever since.
    ‘We’ve been in the Philippines,’ Mrs Nisbet announced in a flat, Midwestern voice. ‘Awful place. Hot and pestilent. I don’t know why we had to go acquiring it from Spain.’
    Her husband concurred, reciting a litany of horrors. Amongst these was a lack of natural modesty and innocence in the native women, which, from his observation, was a common problem across the Extreme Orient.
    The Nisbets found a sympathetic listener in Mrs Ragsdale. Back in California, Mr Ragsdale had been active in the anti-coolie movement. When an unsolved murder, in which a Chinese laundryman was a suspect, inflamed racial tensions in Sonoma County, he editorialised in The Daily Republican that the Chinese were a race that possessed ‘neither conscience, mercy or humanfeeling’, and was composed of ‘monsters in human form, cunning and educated, therefore more dangerous and vile’. It had come as something of a shock to both Mr and Mrs Ragsdale to find that the road out of scandal and financial ruin in the US led them to China itself. To the Nisbets, Mrs Ragsdale now confessed that her experience of China had only deepened her natural suspicion not just of Chinese but of native cultures generally.
    ‘They are so very, very far from Christendom and civilisation,’ Reverend Nisbet agreed.
    ‘Not to mention soap and carbolic,’ interjected Mrs Nisbet. ‘Despite all our efforts. You’ve been in China for years now, Dr Morrison, and have travelled widely in this region. Have you not also found it difficult living in heathen society for as long as you have?’
    ‘I can’t say that I have, Mrs Nisbet. I, myself, found Manila a highly civilised city. And whilst I confess I came to China possessed of the strong racial antipathy towards the Chinese common