She was lamentably without comparisons; such few young men as she had seen--white men--had been on the beach, pitiful and terrible objects.
The word _handsome_ was a little beyond her grasp.

She could not apply it in this instance because she was not sure the application would be correct.

Perhaps what urged her interest in the young man's direction was the dead whiteness of his face, the puffed eyelids and the bloodshot whites.

She knew the significance: the red corpuscle was being burnt out by the fires of alcohol.

Was he, too, on the way to the beach?
What a pity! All alone, and none to warn him of the abject wretchedness at the end of Drink.
Only the night before, in the dining room of the Hong-Kong Hotel, she had watched him empty glass after glass of whisky, and shudder and shudder.