The short story "Rain" illustrates Maugham's inclination to satirize middle- and upper-class Englishmen, especially when they find themselves in an exotic setting. In this story, two professionals, a doctor and a missionary clergyman, are stranded briefly in Samoa owing to a quarantine of their ship. The English sense of propriety, order, and social class are objects of gentle, minor satire in the story.
More significantly, the story represents an instance of character as destiny, with the life of the clergyman ending tragically. Of the professionals in Maugham's fiction,.....
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