To the musician oft a mis-struck note Suggests a brighter strain of harmony;

The lovable dope admitted stealing glimpses of her as she rounded the table shooting. He went on to compliment that her hair was lustrous. The cherriest lips he had ever seen.

The middle-class families celebrated by Kipling, the prolific lowbrow families whose sons officered the army and navy and swarmed over all the waste places of the earth from the Yukon to the Irrawaddy, were dwindling before 1914. The thing that had killed them was the telegraph. In a narrowing world, more and more governed from Whitehall, there was every year less room for individual initiative... By 1920 nearly every inch of the colonial empire was in the grip of Whitehall. Well-meaning, over-civilized men, in dark suits and black felt hats, with neatly rolled umbrellas crooked over the left forearm, were imposing their constipated view of life on Malaya and Nigeria, Mombasa and Mandalay.

Shanghai, and about half of the International Settlement, was now firmly controlled by the Japanese. The other half of the settlement, crowded with four million Chinese refugees,¹⁴ maintained a tenuous and uneasy independence. British, American, and other foreign troops patrolled opposite Japanese soldiers. Much of the city was in ruins; entire streets in Hongkew, one of the poorest sections of the city, had been turned into rubble and the lanes were filled with corpses.¹⁵ In the years that followed, as nations throughout the world continued to turn away Europe’s Jewish refugees, the city the Western powers had forced open a century earlier became the Jews’ only refuge. It had little else to offer them; most of the refugees were directed to Hongkew.