been bored. We sailed along the coast, and it was boiling hot. A prao does not offer much opportunity for diversion, and in addition I happened to be in a doleful mood, contributed to by many causes. First of all, I had an unhappy love, secondly, an . . . unhappy love, thirdly . . . well, something else of the same kind, etc. Ah, well, that’s in the nature of things. But moreover I chanced to be at a point between two attacks of ambition. I had made myself a king and had been dethroned again. I had climbed the tower and had fallen to the ground. . . . I shall pass over this time how it all came about! Enough, I was sitting in this prao with a sour face and in a bad humour, and was what the Germans call ‘unenjoyable.’ Amongst other things I considered that it was not right and proper to make me inspect pepper-gardens, and that long ago I ought to have been appointed Governor of a solar system. Then also it appeared to me a sort of mental murder to place a mind like mine in one prao with this stupid datoo and his child.
“I may add, though, that otherwise I liked the Malay Chiefs, and got on with them very well. They even have much in their composition that makes me prefer them to the Javanese Grandees. Yes, I know, Verbrugge, that in this you do not agree with me, and there are but few people who admit that I am right in having such an opinion . . . but we won’t discuss that point now.
“If I had made that trip on another day—with fewer cobwebs in my head, I mean—I should probably have at once entered into conversation with the datoo, and perhaps I should have found that he was well worth my cultivation. Probably also I should then have induced the little girl to talk, and this might have entertained and amused me, for in a child there usually is some originality . . . although I must admit that I was still too much of a child myself to be interested in originality. This is different now. Now I see in every girl of thirteen a manuscript in which as yet but little or nothing has been erased. One surprises the author in undress, and this is often quite pretty.
