The History of Man

Mrs Garstin was a hard, cruel, managing and ambitious woman. Coming to Hong Kong on her marriage, she found it hard to reconcile herself to the fact that her social position was A22 ______ by her husband’s occupation.

Of course everyone was very kind, and for two or three months they went out to parties almost every night, but she understood quickly that as the wife of a bacteriologist she was of no particular consequence.

“It’s too absurd,” she told her husband. “There’s hardly anyone here that one would bother about for five minutes at home”.

“It is rather funny when you think of all the people who used to come to our house at home that here we should be A23______ like dirt,” she said, laughing in A24______that what she said might not seem snobbish.

She was the daughter of a solicitor in Liverpool, and Bernard Garstin had met her there. He had seemed then a young man of A25 ______ and her father said he would go far, but he hadn’t.

He was painstaking, industrious and capable, but he had not the will to advance himself. Mrs Garstin despised him. But she recognized that she could only achieve success through him, and she set herself to drive him on the way she desired to go.

She discovered that if she wanted him to do something which his sensitiveness revolved against she had only to give him no peace and eventually, exhausted, he would give A26 ______.

Still he made no headway as a leader. But he A27______ any disappointment he may have felt, and if he reproached his wife it was in his heart.

His daughters had never looked upon him as anything but a source of income; and now, understanding that through his A28 ______ money was less plentiful, the indifference they had felt for him was tinged with contempt.

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