After her husband’s death, Kitty returns to Hong Kong, where he meets with

Dorothy Townsend, Charles’s wife. Dorothy convinces Mrs. Fane to stay with
them before leaving for England. Now Kitty is considered a heroine, because she
voluntarily followed her husband, putting herself in great danger. Having met
Townsend himself and even showing him her contempt, Kitty is once again carried
away by him. However, having renewed this relationship, she only feels an
aversion to herself. Kitty could not yield to his pressure, but now Kitty sees it in a
completely different way than before. She hastens the departure and finally says
the following words to him: "I don't feel human. I feel like an animal. A pig or a
rabbit or a dog. Oh, I don't blame you, I was just as bad. I yielded to you because I
wanted you. But it wasn't the real me. I'm not that hateful, beastly, lustful woman. I
disown her. It wasn't me that lay on that bed panting for you when my husband
was hardly cold in his grave and your wife had been so kind to me, so
indescribably kind. It was only the animal in me, dark and fearful like an evil
spirit, and I disown, and hate, and despise it. And ever since, when I've thought of
it, my gorge rises and I feel that I must vomit.". Reading these lines, we see how
much Kitty and her vision of herself and the world has changed. I think Maugham
used this trick on purpose and made Kitty stumble again, so that we could see that
she was on the right track. She still makes mistakes, but her attitude to these
mistakes is now completely different and we see that she is striving to become
better with all her might.

On her way to the UK, Kitty finds out about the death of her own mother. Her
father is a lawyer, he was just offered the post of chief judge in the Bahamas and
he agreed. Kitty eagerly tries to convince her soft-skinned father to let her leave
with him. She wants to devote her life to her father and child, whom she intends to
protect from the same mistakes that she made. At the end of the novel, turning to
her father, whom for many years she looked at only as an impersonal source of her
well-being, Kitty asks for his forgiveness. She admits all her mistakes and talks
about all the bitterness of her life. She says she wants to raise her child as a decent
person.

The main idea of the novel, in my opinion, is as follows: life, such an ordinary
one, with its petty fuss, vanity, sins and betrayals, fades in the face of universal
tragedy, a moral duty, a serious and big deal that affects the lives of many and
many people . Life is a whirl of events and people around us and in this life you
can not only evaluate the "cover", as Kitty did in the beginning, because holding
on to a stone in a beautiful wrapper, you may not notice the gold. Our lives are too
short to waste on unworthy people.