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For he knew now that he had never yet succeeded in keeping in step with his con-panions, whether European or Asiatic, because he himself was neither one nor the other.

His hosts were unfailingly kind & extended themselves to make him feel at home, he was always conscious of a barrier, carefully disguised, but still there.They liked him.They were genuinely interested in his views. They enjoyed his company & were pleased that he should speak their tongue as well as they themselves did... But he was not one of them. He might be a welcome guest, but he was also a feringhi: a foreigner.

‘Poor Belinda!' thought Ash, looking back a little wryly at that pasteboard paragon of his own devising, and at the tedious young prig that he himself had been. It was not her fault that she had failed to live up to that idealized portrait; he doubted if anyone could have done so.