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chokka.”
    â€œNo, you won’t do better than this place nowhere, mate,” the matelot said. They went off, the matelot swaggering a little, the girl balancing on her high heels.
    I watched them cross the hall, grinning to myself. Well, I am an idiot, I thought. I ought to have guessed from the clerk’s face when I asked for a room. A room for a month! I suppose he’s only used to letting rooms by the hour. And I turned and went through the swing door into the bar.
    Inside it was dim after the daylight of the hall. The windows were curtained and the room lit like a night club with rosy diffused light. I paused while my eyes adjusted themselves. Then the scene began to take shape: the bar counter in the corner; the huge walnut-and-chromium juke box playing “Seven Lonely Days”; the Chinese waiters carrying trays of beer among the tables; and the sailors at the tables; and the girls.
    Yes, that sailor was right, I thought. I won’t do better than here.
    Yes, this is what I’ve been waiting for. This is the point of contact. This is where I’ll be able to start.
    And I went across to an empty table, and ordered a beer.
    II
    â€œActually, I am not very popular with the sailors,” said Gwenny Lee. “I am too thin. Too skinny.”
    â€œBut you’re very pretty, Gwenny.”
    â€œNo, I’m much too skinny. And I have no sex appeal. It is sex appeal that really matters.”
    She clicked away with her knitting needles. The juke box was playing “You Can’t Tell a Waltz from a Tango,” the second favorite to “Seven Lonely Days” which had just been played three times in succession. The grizzled, middle-aged matelot at the next table comfortably sucked at his pipe, with the calm satisfaction of a man at his own fireside, while a girl snuggled kittenishly in his arms. The atmosphere was smoky and the table tops smelled of spilt beer. It was still early and there were not more than a dozen sailors scattered round the tables; they were all English, except for three Americans who Gwenny had explained were regulars from the U.S. Station Ship—there were no visiting American ships in port at present. The girls outnumbered the sailors, and at one table five girls sat by themselves looking bored.
    Gwenny Lee broke off her knitting to free some more wool from the ball in the bag beside her. She had joined me at my table soon after I had sat down, and we had been talking for an hour. She was a thin girl of twenty-six with a pale triangular face and gentle eyes. She wore a Western-style cotton dress, instead of the cheongsam worn by most of the girls, and a crucifix on a thin gold chain round her neck: she was a Catholic, educated at a mission school in China. Now she lived in one room in Wanchai with her mother and sister, whom she supported financially. She was determined that her sister should stay respectable and make a good marriage; and once this happened, she would be able to give up working at the Nam Kok.
    â€œYes, it is sex appeal that counts,” she went on philosophically. “Some girls who are not at all pretty make much more money than I do. That girl, for instance—Typhoo.” She nodded to a girl across the room. “She is not pretty, but she has sex appeal. Also, of course, she is not so skinny.”
    â€œYou’re not as bad as all that, Gwenny.”
    â€œOh, yes, look.” She put down her knitting—it was a yellow jumper that she was making for her sister—and pushed up the sleeve of her cardigan. Her arm was pathetically thin and shapeless. “I always have to wear something to hide my arms. It is very annoying in summer when it is hot.”
    â€œYou must appeal to some men very much, Gwenny,” I said.
    â€œWell, sometimes. I had one boy friend called Chuck. He was an American. His ship stayed in Hong Kong five days, and I was very fond of him. I took him to the Tiger Balm Pagoda and the