Doris’s suffering is due to being confronted with the fact that her husband had lived with a native for ten years. She is made painfully aware of the fact that he went to England with the sole intention of marrying a white women, implying that she was his last resort, ‘I don’t mind telling you that I was getting rather despondent about it when I met you’ (p.56, ll. 25–26). Guy’s determination to conceal his former cohabitation from his wife results from his (justified) fear of losing her (and what she represents: ‘civilized’ society), as he ‘couldn’t expect [her] to understand’ (p.56, l. 33). His secrecy is something she reproaches him for, as he failed to supply her with information that might have helped her decide whether she should marry him or not. For the most part, she conceals her misery behind a show of normal behaviour. Only little gestures and glances give away her desperate state of mind: ‘She wrung her hands, and her twisted, tortured fingers looked like little writhing snakes’ (p.60, ll. 29–31). The real cause for her decision to leave her husband, admitted only towards the end, lies in the stereotypical patterns of colonial thought, namely the demonization of natives who are believed to contaminate everything they touch: ‘It’s a physical thing […] I think of those thin black arms of hers round you and it fills me with a physical nausea. I think of you holding those little black babies in your arms. Oh, it’s loathsome. The touch of you is odious to me’ (p.64, ll. 1–5). Here, the native is described as ‘black’, a term that is generic for all non-white people. Doris’s behaviour confirms the view that women were less able to adapt to the ‘otherness’ of life in the colonies; this view seems to correspond to the natives’ point of view: ‘The old Sultan didn’t think it was a white woman’s country. He rather encouraged people to – keep house with native girls. Of course things have changed now.’ (p.44, ll. 3–5). Her return to England is a return to her previous social state – the drab, lower-middle-class existence of a secretary, caring for her widowed mother. Her future looks bleak, as she will probably end up as sour old maid in an insecure financial situation. This prospect may also have contributed to the long period of six months when she hesitates to make her final decision. Her failure to adapt to the new circumstances, to ‘go native’ herself, is at least partly due to her inability to overcome her middle-class Victorian prejudices about ‘blackness’ much more than repulsion at her husband’s hiding his former life.