Here Ma Hla May intentionally debases herself in a desperate attempt to appeal to Flory’s sense of his own status and power, offering to be his “slave” and his adulterous mistress. It doesn’t work, perhaps because Flory is less invested in and more alienated from the economic, racial, and gender hierarchies that make him a desirable, high-status sexual partner to Ma Hla May. Yet he empathizes with Ma Hla May's "sorrow" precisely because they are “without a trace of nobility”—empathy that may foreshadow Flory suffering similar sorrows in the future.