Border ways are so simple that even these girls remain honest. Before entertaining a stranger, they ask for their money and count it before closing the door and getting down to business. But in the case of an old customer, the matter of payment is left up to him. Whereas most of the women’s income comes from merchants, it is usually the boatmen who win their hearts. Two lovers at parting bite their lips and swear to go steady during their separation. For six or seven weeks maybe, the man on his boat and the girl on the waterfront wait for the long days to go by, the hearts of each with the loved one far away. The girls, especially, love so well that if one’s sweetheart fails to return by the time appointed, she dreams of his boat putting in to shore and sees him bound down the gangway to run to her side. If she has begun to doubt him, she dreams of him singing to another woman, forgetting her. Then weaker spirits jump into the river or swallow opium in their dreams, while the bolder seize a chopper to take revenge. Although outside the pale of normal society, their love affairs too are attended by tears and laughter, and love and hate loom so large in their lives that passion can easily blind them to all around. Where they differ from other young people is simply in intensity of feeling — call it greater folly, if you like. Short-term engagements, long-term “marriages”, or a temporary retirement — none of the simple folk there think any the worse of prostitutes for such behaviour, not using the standards of educated men to condemn them. Prostitutes they may be, yet setting such store by right, so little by profit, they are often more to be trusted than those gentlemen in the city who talk of nothing but morality and conscience.