"For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul?
or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul ?" At Surat, by a window of his private office in the East India Company's factory, a middle-aged man stared out upon the broad river and the wharves below.

Business in the factory had ceased for the day: clerks and porters had gone about their own affairs, and had left the great building strangely cool and empty and silent.
The wharves, too, were deserted--all but one, where a Hindu sat in the shade of a pile of luggage, and the top of a boat's mast wavered like the index of a balance above the edge of the landing-stairs.
The luggage belonged to the middle-aged man at the window: the boat was to carry him down the river to the _Albemarle_, East Indiaman, anchored in the roads with her Surat cargo aboard.

She would sail that night for Bombay and thence away for England.
He was ready; dressed for his journey in a loose white suit, which, though designed for the East, was almost aggressively British.
A Cheapside tailor had cut it, and, had it been black or gray or snuff-coloured instead of white, its wearer might have passed all the way from the Docks to Temple Bar for a solid merchant on 'Change--a self-respecting man, too, careless of dress for appearance' sake, but careful of it for his own, and as part of a habit of neatness.
He wore no wig (though the date was 1723), but his own gray hair, brushed smoothly back from a sufficiently handsome forehead and tied behind with a fresh black ribbon.

In his right hand he held a straw hat, broad-brimmed like a Quaker's, and a white umbrella with a green lining.

His left fingered his clean-shaven chin as he gazed on the river.
The ceremonies of leave-taking were done with and dismissed; so far as he could, he had avoided them.