We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.
V
DECORATIONS BY LEONARD FRANK
looks bequeathed to him by some distant Levantine ancestor made him invaluable to his mistress.
There was Percival Montgomery Howe, whose name belied his origin. For he was Chinese, this grotesquely rotund go-between or comprador as he was known in the international settlement. Then there was the renegade Englishman, Caesar Hawkins, with the mind of a first-class bookkeeper, hopelessly mixed up in everything but his figures.
Yes, it was a strange establishment, and none stranger than Mother Gin Sling herself, her face a mask as she stopped at the poker table to talk to the three members of the international colony who sat there playing cards with her comprador. They were her friends : Van Aalst, the Dutch official; De Michot, the French banker; and Jackson, the English lawyer — or as much her friends as anyone could be. But now in some unfathomable way they had become her enemies. They were there that night, not to gamble alone but to tell her that she must either close down her establishment or move into the Chinese City on the orders of the new head of the India-China Trading Company.
"Every so often Shanghai decides to clean itself like a swan in a muddy lake." Mother Gin Sling sounded amused as she motioned the dealer to cut her in on the
next hand. "I shall not move, and I certainly shall not close."
These threats to her security had happened before. She was not half as interested in this one as in deciding what she should do with the stranded chorus girl Omar had just rescued from a jail sentence as a derelict. She had caught a glimpse of the girl waiting for her as she had passed through the j hall, still so pretty with her yellow hair and blue eyes in spite of the shabby clothes she was wearing, and even the runs in her shoddy silk stockings couldn't disguise the loveliness of her slender legs. She -could use this Dixie Pomeroy to good advantage once she had dressed
26