A House Divided

II

WANG YUAN WAS IN the twentieth year of his age when he went away from his own country, but in many ways a boy still and full of dreams and confusions and plans half begun which he did not know how to finish, or even if he wanted to finish them. He had all his life long been guarded and watched over and cared for by someone, and he did not know any other thing than such care, and for all his three days in that cell, he did not know what sorrow truly was. He stayed six years away.

When he made ready to return again to his country in the summer of that year he was near to his twenty-sixth birthday and he was a man in many things, though no sorrow had yet come to put the final shape of manhood on him, but this he did not know he needed. If any had asked him, he would have said steadfastly, “I am a man. I know my own mind. I know what I want to do. My dreams are plans now. I have finished my years at school. I am ready for my life in my own country.” And indeed to Yuan these six years in foreign parts were like another half of his life. The early nineteen years were the first lesser half, and the six were the greater, more valuable ones, for these years had taken him and set him fast in certain ways. But the truth was, although he did not know it, he was set in many ways of which he was not himself aware.

If any had asked him, “How are you ready now to live your life?” he would have answered honestly, “I have a degree of learning from a great foreign college, and I took that degree above many who were native to the land.” This he would have said proudly, but he would not have told of a certain memory he had that there were those among his fellows in this foreign people who muttered against him saying, “Of course, if a man wants to be nothing but a grind he can carry off the honors in grades, but we owe more to the school than that. This fellow — he grinds at his books and that is all — he takes no part in the life — where would the school be in football and in the boat races if we all did it?”

Yes, Yuan knew these pushing, crowding, merry foreign youths who so spoke of him, and they took no great pains to hide the words, but said them in the halls. But Yuan held his head high. He was secure in the praise of his teachers and in the mention he received at times of prize-giving, when his name often came the first and always it was said by the one who gave the prize, “Although he works in a language foreign to him, he has surpassed the others.” So, although Yuan knew he was not loved for this, he had gone proudly on, and he was glad to show what his race could do, and glad to show them that he did not value games so high as children did.

If again one had asked him, “How are you ready now to live your man’s life?” he would have answered, “I have read many hundreds of books, and I have searched to find out all I could from this foreign nation.”

And this was true, for in these six years Yuan lived as lone as a thrush in a cage. Every morning he rose early and read his books, and when a bell rang in the house where he lived he went downstairs and took his breakfast, eating usually in silence, for he did not trouble to talk much to any other in that house, nor to the woman whose it was. And why should he waste himself in speech with them?

At noon he took his meal among the many students in the vast hall there was for this purpose. And in the afternoons, if he had not work in the field or with his teachers, he did what he loved most to do. He went into the great hall of books and sat among the books and read and wrote down what he would keep and pondered on many things. In these hours he was forced to discover that these western peoples were not, as Meng had cried so bitterly, a savage race, in spite of the rudeness of the common people, and they were learned in sciences. Many times Yuan heard his own countrymen in this foreign country say that in the use and knowledge of materials these folk excelled, but in all the arts whereby men’s spirits live, they lacked. Yet now, looking at the rooms of books which were all of philosophy, or all of poetry, or all of art, Yuan wondered if even his own people were greater, though he would have died before he spoke such a wonder aloud in this foreign land. He even found translated into western tongues the sayings of the earlier and later sages of his own people, and books which told of arts of the East, and he was aghast at all this learning, and half he was envious of these people who possessed it and half he hated them for it, and he did not like to remember that in his own country a common man often could not read a book, and less often could his wife.

Yuan had been of two different minds since he came to this foreign country. When he grew well upon the ship and felt his forces come back into him after those three days of death, he was glad to live again. Then as he grew glad to live he caught from Sheng his pleasure in the travel and in all the new sights they would see and in the greatness of the foreign lands. So Yuan had entered upon the new shores as eager as any child to see a show, and ready to be pleased by everything.

And he found everything to please. When first he entered into the great port city on this new country’s western coast it seemed to him that all he ever heard was more than true. The houses were higher than he had heard and the streets were tiled and paved like floors of houses and clean enough to sit on or to sleep on and not be soiled. And all the people seemed most wonderfully clean. The whiteness of their skins and the cleanness of their garments were very pleasing to see, and they all seemed rich and fed, and Yuan was glad because here at least the poor were not mingled among the rich. Here the rich came and went most freely on the streets and no beggars plucked at their sleeves and cried out for mercy and a little silver. It was such a country as could be enjoyed, for all had enough, and one could eat with joy because all so ate.

Thus Yuan and Sheng together in those first days could not but cry at much beauty to be seen. For these people lived in palaces, or so it seemed to these two young men who had not seen such homes. In this city away from the shops the streets stretched wide and shaded by great trees and families needed not to build high walls about them, but each grassy garden ran into the next man’s, and this was a marvel to Yuan and Sheng, because it seemed every man so trusted his neighbor that he needed not to build against him or his thievery.

Thus at first all seemed perfect in that city. The great square high buildings were cut so clean against the blue metallic sky that they seemed mighty temples, only there were no gods inside. And between these ran at great speed the thousand thousand vehicles of that city all filled with rich men and their ladies, although even the people who went on foot seemed to do it out of joy and not because they must. At first Yuan had said to Sheng, “There must be something wrong here in this city, that so many people go at such speed somewhere.” But when he and Sheng had looked awhile they perceived that these people looked very gay and often laughed, and their high clacking speech was more merry than it was mournful, and there was no trouble anywhere, and they went quickly because they loved swiftness. Such was their temper.

And indeed there was here a strange power in the very air and sunshine. Where in Yuan’s mother country the air was often somnolent and soothing, so that in summer one must sleep long and in winter one wished only to curl into a close space for sleep and warmth, in this new country the winds and sunshine were filled with a wild driving energy, so that Yuan and Sheng walked more quickly than their wont was, and in the beaming light the people moved like shining mingling motes driven through the sunshine.

Yet already in those earliest two days when all was strange to them, and all to be enjoyed, Yuan found his pleasure checked by a certain moment. Even now after six years were gone Yuan could not say he had forgot that moment wholly, though it was a small thing, too. The second day upon the shore he and Sheng went into a certain common restaurant where many ate, and there were people not rich as some, perhaps, but still well enough to eat as they chose. When Yuan and Sheng passed through the doors from the street, Yuan felt, or thought he did, that these white men and women stared somewhat at him and at Sheng, and he thought they drew a little off from them, though the truth was Yuan was glad they did, because there was about them a strange alien odor, a little like a certain curd of milk they loved to eat, though not so foul, perhaps. When they went into that place to eat, a maid standing at a counter took their hats from them to hang among many others, for so the custom was, and when they came back to claim them this maid put many hats out at a time, and a certain man before Yuan could stay him, reached out his hand and seized on Yuan’s hat, which was of a brown hue like his own, and he pressed it on his head and ran out of the door. At once Yuan saw what was the mistake, and hastening after he said with courtesy, “Sir, here is your hat. Mine, which is the inferior one, you have taken by mistake. It is my fault, I was so slow.” And then Yuan bowed and held forth the other’s hat.

But the man, who was no longer young, and who wore an anxious, sharp look upon his thin face, listened with impatience to Yuan’s speech, and now he seized his own hat, and with great distaste removed from his bald head Yuan’s hat. Nor did he stop except to say two words, and these he spat forth.

Thus Yuan was left standing holding his hat and wishing he need not set it on his head again, for he had not liked the man’s shining white pate — and most of all he did not like the hiss of the man’s voice. When Sheng came up he asked Yuan, “Why do you stand as though you had been struck?”

“That man,” said Yuan, “struck me with two words I did not understand, except I know they were evil.”

At this Sheng laughed, but there was an edge of light bitterness in his laughter. “It may be he called you foreign devil,” he said.

“Two evil words they were, I know,” said Yuan, troubled, and beginning to be less joyful.

“We are now foreigners,” said Sheng and after a while he shrugged himself and said again, “All countries are alike, my cousin.”

Yuan said nothing. But he was not again so joyful and not so wholly pleased again with anything he saw. Inside he gathered steadfastly his own self, stubborn and resistant. He, Yuan, son of Wang the Tiger, grandson of Wang Lung, would remain himself forever, never lost in any millions of white alien men.

That day he could not forget his hurt until Sheng saw it again and laughed and said with a little smile of malice, “Do not forget that in our country Meng would have cried at that little man that he was a foreign devil, so the hurt might have been the other way.” And after a while he told Yuan to look at this strange sight or that, until he had diverted Yuan at last.

In the next days and in all the years to come when there was so much to see and to make wonder over, he would have said he had forgotten that small one thing, except he had not. As clearly today, if he happened to take thought of it, as he had six years ago, he saw that man’s angry look and he could still feel the wound, which seemed to him unjust.

But if he had not forgotten, yet the memory was often buried. For Yuan and Sheng together saw much beauty in those first days in the foreign country. They rode on a train which bore them through great mountains where, although spring was warm upon the foothills, yet snow was white and thick against the high blue skies, and between these mountains there were black gorges where deep waters foamed and frothed and Yuan staring down at all this mad beauty felt it almost too much and scarcely real, but like some wild painter’s picture hung there beneath the train, foreign and strange and too sharply colored, and not made of earth and rocks and water of which his own country was compounded.

When the mountains were behind them, there were valleys as extravagant and fields big enough to be counties and machines struggling like huge beasts to make ready the fertile earth for gigantic harvests. Yuan saw it very clearly, and this was even more a marvel to him than the mountains. He stared at the great machines and he remembered how the old farmer had taught him to hold a hoe and fling it so it fell true to its set place. So did that farmer still till his land, and so did others like him. And Yuan remembered how the farmer’s little fields were made, each neatly fitted to the other, and how his few vegetables grew green and heavy with the human wastes he saved and poured on them, so that every plant grew to its richest best, and every plant and every foot of land had its full value. But here none could take thought of single plants and any foot of land. Here fields were measured by the mile, and plants unnumbered, doubtless.

Thus in those first days everything except that one man’s words seemed good to Yuan and better than anything in his own country could be. The villages were clean and very prosperous, and although he could recognize the different look of a man upon the land and a man who lived in any town, still the man upon the land did not go ragged in his coat, and the houses on this land were never made of earth and thatch, nor did the fowls and pigs stray as they would. These were all things to admire, or so Yuan thought.

Yet from those first days even Yuan felt the earth here strange and wild and not like his own earth. For as time passed and Yuan knew better what that earth was from walking often along country roads or tilling a piece for himself in the foreign school even as he had in his own country, he never could forget the difference. Though the earth which fed these white folk was the same earth which had fed Yuan’s race, too, yet working on it, Yuan knew it was not the very earth in which his forefathers were buried. This earth was fresh and free of human bones, and so not tamed, since of this new race not yet enough were dead to saturate the soil with their essences as Yuan knew the soil of his own country was saturated with its own humanity. This earth was still stronger than the people who strove to possess it, and they were wild through its wildness and in spite of wealth and learning often savage in their spirits and their looks.

For the earth was uncaptured. The miles of wooded mountains; all the waste of fallen logs and rotting leaves beneath great trees ungarnered; the lands let free to grass and pasture for beasts; the carelessness of wide roads running everywhere; these showed forth the unconquered land. Men used what they wanted, they brought forth great groaning harvests, more than they could sell, they cut down trees and used only the fields that were best and left the others to waste, and still the land was more than they could use, and greater still than they.

In Yuan’s own country the land was conquered and men were the masters. There the mountains were stripped of their forests in years long past, and in these present times were shaven even of the wild grasses to feed the fires of men. And men coaxed the fullest harvests from the tiny fields they had, and forced the land to labor for them for its fullest and into the land again they poured themselves, their sweat, their wastes, their dead bodies, until there was no more virginity left in it. Men made the soil out of themselves, and without them the earth would have been long since exhausted, and but an empty barren womb.

So Yuan felt when he mused over this new country and what its secret was. On his own bit of land he thought first of what he had to put in before he could have hope of harvest. Here this foreign earth was enriched still by its own unused strength. For a little put in, it gave forth greatly, leaping into life too strong for men.

When did Yuan come to mingle hatred in this admiration? At the end of six years he could look back and see the second step he took in hatred.

Yuan and Sheng parted early and at the end of that first journey on the train, for Sheng fell into love of a great city where he found others of his own kind, and he said the schools there were better for such as he was who loved to learn of verse and music and of philosophies, and he cared nothing for the land as Yuan did. For Yuan set his heart to do in this foreign country what he had always hoped to do, to learn how to breed plants and how to till the soil and all such things, and the more steadfastly because he soon believed this people owed their power to their wealth of harvest from the land. So Yuan left Sheng behind in that city, and he went on into another town and to another school where he could have what he wanted.

First of all Yuan must find himself a place to eat and sleep and a room to call his home in this strange land. When he went to the school he was met courteously enough by a grey-haired white man who gave him lists of certain places where he might be housed and fed, and Yuan set forth to find the best one. The very first door at which he rang a bell was opened to him, and there stood a huge woman, one no longer young, and wiping her great bare red arms upon an apron that she wore about her vast middle.

Now Yuan had never seen a woman shaped like this one, and he could not bear her looks at this first instant, but he asked very courteously, “Is the master of this house at home?”

Then this female set her two hands on her thighs and she answered in a very loud-mouthed heavy way, “It’s my house, and there is no man who owns it.” At this Yuan turned to go away, for he thought he would rather try another place than this, thinking there must not be many even in this land so hideous as this woman, and he would rather live in a house where a man was. For this woman was truly more than could be believed; her girth and bosom were enormous, and on her head was short hair of a hue Yuan thought could not have grown from human skin except he saw it. It was a bright reddish-yellow color, dulled somewhat with kitchen grease and smoke. Beneath this strange hair her round fat face shone forth, a red again, but now of a different purplish red, and in this visage were set two small sharp eyes as blue and bright as new porcelain is sometimes. He could not bear to see her, and he let his eyes fall and then he saw her two spreading shapeless feet and those he could not bear either and he made haste away, and after courtesy turned to go elsewhere.

Nevertheless, when he had asked at another door or two where it was marked there were rooms for lodgers, he found himself refused. At first he did not know the reason why. One woman said, “My rooms are taken,” although Yuan knew she bed, seeing that her sign of empty rooms was there. And so it was again and yet again. At last the truth was shown him. A man said bluntly, “We don’t take any colored people here.” At first Yuan did not know what was meant, not thinking of his pale yellow skin as being other than the usual hue of human flesh, nor his black eyes and hair what men’s hair and eyes might always be. But in a moment he understood, for he had seen black men here and there about this country and marked how they were not held in high respect by white ones.

Up from his heart the blood rushed, and the man, seeing his face darken and glow, said half in apology, “My wife has to help me out in making our way in these hard times, and we have regular boarders, and they wouldn’t stay if we was to bring in foreigners. There’s places where they do take them, though,” and the man named the number of the house and street where Yuan had seen the hideous female.

This was the second step in hatred.

He thanked the man therefore with deep proud courtesy and he went back again to that first house, and averting his eyes from her dreadful person, he told the woman he would see the room she had. The room he liked well enough, a small upper room against the roof, very clean, and cut off by a stairway. If he could forget the woman, this room seemed well enough. He could see himself there quietly at work, alone, and he liked the look of the roofs sloping down about the bed and table and the chair and chest it held. So he chose to stay in it, and this room was his home for the six years.

And the truth was the woman was not so ill as her looks and he lived in her house, year after year, while he went to that school, and the woman grew kind to him and he came to understand her kindness, covered as it was by her hideous looks and coarse ways. In his room he lived as sparsely and as neatly as a priest, his few possessions always placed exactly and this woman came to like him well and she sighed her gusty sigh and said, “If all my boys was like you, Wang, and as little trouble in their ways, I’d be a different woman now.”

Then he found, as a few days went by, that this burly female creature was very kind in her loud way. Although Yuan cringed before the sound of her great voice, and shivered at the sight of her thick red arms bared to her shoulders, still he thanked her truly when he found some apples put in his room and he knew she meant kindness when she shouted at him across the table where they ate, “I cooked some rice for you, Mr. Wang! I reckon you find it hard eating without what you’re used to—” And then she laughed freely and roared, “But rice is the best I can do — snails and rats and dogs and all them things you eat I can’t supply!”

She did not seem to hear Yuan’s protest that indeed he did not eat these things at home. And after a while he learned to smile in silence when she made one of her jokes and he remembered at such times, he made himself remember, that she pressed food on him, more than he could eat, and kept his room warm and clean and when she knew he liked a certain dish she went to some pains to make it for him. At last he learned never to look into her face, which still he found hideous, and he learned to think only of her kindness, and this the more when he found as time passed by and he came to know a few others of his countrymen, in this town, circumstanced as he was, that there were many less good than she in lodging houses, women of acrid tongues and sparing of their food at table, and scornful of a race other than their own.

Yet when he thought of it here was the strangest thing of all to Yuan, that this gross loud-mouthed woman once had been wed. In his own land it might have been no wonder, for there youths and maidens wed whom they must before the new times came, and a man must take what was given him, even though it were an ugly wife. But in this foreign land for long there had been choosing of maid by the man himself. So once then was this woman chosen freely by a man! And by him, before he died, she had a child, a girl, now seventeen or so in age, who lived with her still.

And here was another strange thing, — the girl was beautiful. Yuan, who never thought a white woman could be truly beautiful, knew well enough this maid, in spite of all her fairness, must be called beautiful. For she had taken her mother’s wiry flaming hair and changed it by some youthful magic in herself into the softest curling coppery stuff, cut short, but winding all about the shape of her pretty head and her white neck. And her mother’s eyes she had, but softer, darker, and larger, and she used a little art to tinge her brows and lashes brown instead of pale as her mother’s were. Her lips, too, were soft and full and very red, and her body slender as a young tree, and her hands were slender, not thick anywhere, and the nails long and painted red. She wore, and Yuan saw it as all the young men saw it, garments of such frail stuff that her narrow hips and little breasts and all the moving lines of her body showed through, and well she knew the young men saw and that Yuan saw. And when Yuan knew she knew it, he felt a strange fear of her and even a dislike, so that he held himself aloof and would not do more than bow in answer to a greeting she might give.

He was glad her voice was not lovely. He liked a low sweet voice and hers was not low or sweet. Whatever she said was said too loudly and too sharply in her nose, and when he was afraid because he felt the softness of her look or if by chance when he took seat at table, where she sat beside him, his eyes fell on the whiteness of her neck, he was glad he did not like her voice. … And after a while he sought and found other things he did not like, too. She would not help her mother in the house, and when her mother asked her at mealtimes to fetch a thing forgotten from the table, she rose pouting and often saying, “You can never set the table, ma, and not forget something.” Nor would she put her hands in water that was soiled with grease or dirt, because she valued her hands so much for beauty.

And all these six years Yuan was glad of her ways he did not like and kept them always clearly before him. He could look at her pretty restless hands beside him, and remember they were idle hands that did not serve another than herself, and so ought not maid’s hands to be, and though he could not, roused as he once had been, avoid the knowledge sometimes of her nearness, yet he could remember the first two words he ever heard upon this foreign earth. He was foreign to this maid, too. Remembering, he could remember that their two kinds of flesh, his and this maid’s, were alien to each other and he was set to be content to hold himself aloof and go his solitary way.

No, he told himself, he had had enough of maids, he who was betrayed, and if he were betrayed here in a foreign land, there would be none to help him. No, better that he stay away from maids. So he would not see the maid, and he learned never to look where her bosom was, and sedulously he refused to go with her if she begged it to some dancing place, for she was bold to invite him sometimes.

Yet there were nights when he could not sleep. He lay in his bed and remembered the dead maid, and he wondered sadly, yet with a thrilling wonder, too, what it was that burned so hot between a man and maid in any country. It was an idle wonder, since he never knew her, and she turned so wicked in the end. On moonlit nights especially he could not sleep. And when at last he did sleep he woke and then perhaps again, to lie and watch the silent, dancing shadows of a tree’s branch against the white wall of his room, shining, for the moon was bright. He turned restlessly at last and hid his eyes and thought, “I wish the moon did not shine so clear — it makes me long for something — as though for some home I never had.”

For these six years were years of great solitude for Yuan. Day by day he shut himself away into greater solitude. Outwardly he was courteous and spoke to all who spoke to him, but to none did he give greeting first. Day by day he shut himself away from what he did not want in this new country. His native pride, the silent pride of men old before the western world began, began to take its full shape in him. He learned to bear silently a foolish curious stare upon the street; he learned what shops he could enter in that small town to buy his necessities, or to have himself shaved or his hair cut. For there were keepers of shops who would not serve him, some refusing bluntly or some asking twice the value of goods, or some saying with a semblance of courtesy, “We have our living to make here and we do not encourage trade with foreigners.” And Yuan learned to answer nothing, whether to coarseness or to courtesy.

He could live days without speech to anyone and it came to be that he might have been like a stranger lost in all this rushing foreign life. For not often did anyone even ask a question of him of his own country. These white men and women lived so enwrapped within themselves that they never cared to know what others did, or if they heard a difference they smiled tolerantly as one may at those who do not do so well from ignorance. A few set thoughts Yuan found his schoolfellows had, or the barber who cut his hair, or the woman in whose house he lodged, such as that Yuan and all his countrymen ate rats and snakes and smoked opium or that all his countrywomen bound their feet, or that all his countrymen wore hair braided into queues.

At first Yuan in great eagerness tried to set these ignorances right. He swore he had not tasted either rat or snake, and he told of Ai-lan and her friends who danced as lightly free as any maidens could. But it was no use, for what he said they soon forgot and remembered only the same things. Yet there was this result to Yuan, that so deep and often his anger rose against this ignorance that at last he began to forget there was any Tightness or truth in anything they said, and he came to believe that all his country was like the coastal city, and that all maidens were like Ai-lan.

There was a certain schoolfellow he had in two of his classes where he learned of the soil, and this young man was a farmer’s son, a lout of a very kind heart, and amiable to everyone. Yuan had not spoken to him when he dropped into the seat beside him at a class, but the youth spoke first and then he walked sometimes with Yuan away from the door, and then sometimes lingered in the sunshine and talked a little while with him, and then one day he asked Yuan to walk with him. Yuan had never met with such kindness yet, and he went and it was sweeter to him than he knew, because he lived so solitary.

Soon Yuan found himself telling his own story to this friend he had found. Together they sat down and rested under a tree bent over the roadside, and they talked on and very soon the lad cried out impetuously, “Say, call me Jim! What’s your name? Wang. Yuan Wang. Mine’s Barnes, Jim Barnes.”

Then Yuan explained how in his country the family name came first, for it gave him the strangest reversed feeling to hear his own name called out first as this lad now did. And this amused the lad again, and he tried his own names backwards, and laughed aloud.

In such small talk and frequent laughter their friendship grew, and led to other talk, and Jim told Yuan how he had lived upon a farm his whole life, and when he said, “My father’s farm has about two hundred acres,” Yuan said, “He must be very rich.” And then Jim looked at him surprised and said, “That’s only a small farm here. Would it be big in your country?”

To this Yuan did not answer straightly. He suddenly could not bear to say how small a farm was in his country, dreading the other’s scorn, and so he only said, “My grandfather had greater lands and he was called a rich man. But our fields are very fertile, and a man needs fewer of them to live upon.”

And so through such talk he passed to telling of the great house in the town and of his father Wang the Tiger, whom he now called a general and not a lord of war, and he told of the coastal city and of the lady and Ai-lan his sister and of the modern pleasures Ai-lan had, and day after day Jim listened and pressed his questions and Yuan talked, scarcely knowing that he said so much.

But Yuan found it sweet to talk. He had been very lonely in this foreign country, more lonely than he knew, and the small slights put on him, which, if he had been asked, he would have said proudly were nothing to him, yet were something to him. Again and again his pride had been stabbed, and he was not used to it. Now it eased him to sit and tell this white lad all the glories of his race and of his family and his nation, and it was a balm to all his wounds to see Jim’s eyes grow large and full of wonder and to hear him say most humbly, “We must look pretty poor to you — a general’s son and all — and all those servants and — I’d like to ask you home with me this summer, but I don’t know as I dare, after all you’ve had!”

Then Yuan thanked him courteously, and with courtesy said, “I am sure your father’s house would be very large and pleasant to me,” and he drank in with pleasure the other’s admiration.

But here was the secret fruit in Yuan of all this talk. He came himself, without his knowing it, to see his country as he said it was. He forgot that he had hated Wang the Tiger’s wars and all his lusty soldiery, and he came to think of the Tiger as a great noble general, sitting in his halls. And he forgot the humble little village where Wang Lung lived and starved and struggled up by labor and by guile, and he only remembered from his childhood the many courts of that great house in the town, which his grandfather had made. He forgot even the small old earthen house and all the millions like it, shaped out of earth and thatched with straw, and housing poor folk and sometimes even beasts with them, and he remembered clearly only the coastal town and all its riches and its pleasure houses. So when Jim asked, “Have you automobiles like we have?” or if he asked, “Do you have houses like ours?” Yuan answered simply, “Yes, we have all these things.”

Nor did he lie. In a measure he spoke the truth, and in a full measure he believed he spoke the whole truth because as days passed his own distant country grew more perfect in his eyes. He forgot everything not beautiful, miseries such as are to be found anywhere, and it seemed to him that only in his country were the men upon the land all honest and content, and all the serving men loyal and all masters kind and all children filial and all maids virtuous and full of modesty.

So much did Yuan come to believe thus in his own distant country that one day by force of his own belief he was driven to say publicly a thing in her defense. It happened that to this town and to a certain temple in it, which was called a church, there came a white man who had lived in Yuan’s country and announced he would show pictures of that far place and tell of its people and their habits. Now Yuan, since he believed in no religion, had never been to this foreign temple, but on this night he went, thinking to hear the man and see what he might show.

In the crowd then Yuan sat. From the first sight of the traveller Yuan did not like him, for he perceived him to be a priest of a sort of whom he had heard but had not seen, and one of those against whom he had been taught in his early school of war, who went abroad with religion as a trade, and enticed humble folk into his sect for some secret purpose, which many guessed at but none knew, except that all know a man does not leave his own land for nothing and with no hope of private gain. Now he stood very tall and grim about the mouth, his eyes sunken in his weathered face, and he began to speak. He told of the poor in Yuan’s land and of the famines and of how in places girl babes were killed at birth, and how the people lived in hovels, and he told filthy, gruesome tales. And Yuan heard them all. Then the man began to show his pictures, pictures of the things he said he had seen himself. Now Yuan saw beggars whining at him from the screen, and lepers with their faces eaten off, and starving children, their bellies swollen though empty, and there were narrow crowded streets and men carrying loads too great for beasts. There were such evils shown as Yuan had not seen in all his sheltered life. At the end the man said solemnly, “You see how our gospel is needed in this sad land. We need your prayers; we need your gifts.” Then he sat down.

But Yuan could not bear it. All through the hour his anger had been rising, mixed with shame and dismay, so to see revealed before this staring, ignorant foreign crowd his country’s faults. And more than faults, for he had not himself seen the things this man had told of, and it seemed to him that this prying priest had searched out every ill that he could find and dragged it forth before the cold eyes of this western world. It was only greater shame to Yuan that at the end the man begged for money for these whom he disclosed this cruelly.

Yuan’s heart broke with anger. He leaped to his feet, he clenched his hands upon the seat in front of him, and he cried loudly, his eyes burning black, his cheeks red, his body trembling, “These are lies this man has told and shown! There are not such things in my country! I myself have never seen these sights — I have not seen those lepers — I have not seen starved children like those — nor houses like those! In my home there are a score of rooms — and there are many houses like mine. This man has shaped lies to tease your money from you. I–I speak for my country! We do not want this man nor do we want your money! We need nothing from you!”

So Yuan shouted, and then he set his lips to keep from weeping and sat down again, and the people sat in great silence and astonishment at what had happened.

As for the man, he listened, smiling thinly, and then he rose and said, and mildly enough, “I see this young man is a modern student. Well, young man, all I can say is that I have lived among the poor, like these I have shown, for more than half my life. When you go back to your own country come into the little city in the inland where I live and I will show you all these things. … Shall we close with prayer?”

But Yuan could not stay for such mockery of praying. He rose and went out and stumbled through the streets to his own room. Soon behind him came the footsteps of others who went homeward too, and here was the final stab which Yuan had that night. Two men passed him, not knowing who he was, and he heard one say, “Queer thing, that Chinese fellow getting up like that, wasn’t it? — Wonder which of ’em was right?”

And the other said, “Both of them, I reckon. It’s safest not to believe all you hear from anybody. But what does it matter what those foreign folks are? It isn’t anything to us!” And the man yawned and the other man said carelessly, “That’s right — looks like rain tomorrow, doesn’t it?” And so they went their way.

Then Yuan, hearing this, was somehow more wounded than if the men had cared. It seemed to him they should have cared, even if the priest had been right, but since he told lies they should have cared to know the truth. He went angry to his bed and lay and tossed and wept a little for very anger’s sake, and vowed he would do something yet to make these people know his country great.

After such a thing as this Yuan’s new friend assuaged him. He took sound comfort in this simple country youth and poured out his beliefs in his own people to him, and told him of the sages who had shaped the noble minds of his ancestors and framed the systems whereby men lived to this day, so that in that far lovely country there was not such wantonness and willfulness as was to be found here. There men and women walked in decency and ordered goodness, and beauty grew from out their goodness. They did not need laws such as were written in these foreign lands, where even children must be protected by a law and women sheltered under law. In his country, Yuan said earnestly, and he believed it, there needed not to be such laws for children were harmed by none, for none there would harm a child, he said, forgetting for the moment the foundlings even his lady mother had told him of, and he said women were always safe and honored in their homes. When the white lad asked, “So it is not true they bind women’s feet?” Yuan replied proudly, “It was an old, old custom, like the one of yours when women bound their waists, and now it is long past and no more to be seen anywhere.”

So Yuan stood in defense of his own land, and this was now his cause. It made him think of Meng sometimes, and now he could value Meng at his true worth and to himself he thought, “Meng was right. Our country has been defamed and brought so low we ought all to come to her support now. I shall tell Meng he saw more truly, after all, than I did.” And he wished he knew where Meng was that he might write and tell him this.

He could write to his father, and so he did. And now Yuan found he could write more kindly and more fully than he ever had. This new love for his country made him love his family more, too, and he wrote saying, “I long often to come home, for no country seems as good to me as my own. Our ways are best, our food the best. As soon as I return I will come gladly home again. I stay here only that I may learn what is to be learned and use it for our country.”

And when he had set after this the usual words of courtesy from son to father, he sealed and stamped the letter and went out upon the street to drop it in a box put there for such purpose. It was an evening of a weekly holiday and all the lights were lit in the shops and young men were rollicking and roaring out songs that they knew, and girls laughed and shouted with them. Yuan, seeing all this savage show, drew down his lips in a cold smile, and he let his thoughts follow after his letter into the dignity and stillness where his father lived alone in his own courts. At least his father was surrounded by hundreds of his own men, and at least he, a war lord, lived honorably according to his code. Yuan seemed to see the Tiger again as he had often seen him, sitting stately in his great carved chair, the tiger skin behind him, before him the copper brazier of burning coals, and all his guard about him, a very king. Then Yuan, in the midst of all the clattering ribaldry, the loud voices and the rude unmelodious music streaming out of dancing places, took greater pride in his own kind than he ever had before. He withdrew himself and went again alone into his room and fell upon his books most resolutely, feeling himself above all such men as were about him and that he came of old and kingly origin.

This was the third step he took in hatred.

The fourth step came soon, and from a different, nearer cause, and it was a thing Yuan’s new friend did. The friendship between these two grew less warm than it was, and Yuan’s talk grew cool and distant, always of work and of the things they heard their teachers say, and this was because Yuan knew now that often when Jim came to the house where he lived he came not to see Yuan but to see that daughter of his landlady.

The thing had begun easily enough. Yuan one evening had brought his new friend to his room, since the day was wet, and they could not go together to walk as their growing habit was. When they entered the house there was the sound of music from a front room and the door stood ajar. It was the landlady’s daughter who made the music, and be sure she knew the door was open. But as he passed Jim looked in and saw the girl, and she saw him and cast him one of her looks and he caught it and whispered to Yuan, “Why didn’t you tell me you had such a peach here?”

Yuan saw his leering look and could not bear it, and he answered gravely, “I do not understand you.” But though he did not understand the word he understood all else and he felt a great discomfort in him. Afterwards he thought of it more gently and told himself he would not remember it, nor let so small a thing as that maid come to mar his friendship, since in this country such things were lightly considered.

But the second time this happened, or that he knew it happened, Yuan was so cut he could have wept. He came late one night, having eaten his night meal away, in order that his work might go on among the books, and when he came in he heard Jim’s voice in a room used in common by them all. Now Yuan, being very weary and his very eyes aching with the long reading of the western books, whose lines run to and fro across the page and thus weary very much eyes used to lines from top to bottom, was glad to hear his friend’s voice and he longed for an hour’s companionship. He pushed open the door, therefore, which was ajar, and cried out gladly and with unwonted freedom in his manner, “I am back, Jim — shall we go upstairs?”

There in that room he saw only these two, Jim, in his hand a box of sweets at whose wrappings he was fumbling, a silly smile upon his face, and opposite him in a deep chair, lying in loose grace, the maid. When she saw Yuan come in, she looked up at him and tossed back her curly, coppery hair and said teasingly, “He came to see me this time, Mr. Wang …” And then seeing the look between the two young men, how the dark blood came slowly into Yuan’s cheeks and how his face, which had been all open and eager, grew closed and smooth and silent, and how on the other’s face a bright red shone out and how hostile that one looked as though he did a thing he could do if he liked, she cried petulantly, waving her pretty red-tipped hand, “Of course if he wants to go—”

A silence hung between the two men, and the girl laughed and then Yuan said gently and quietly, “Why should he not do what he likes?”

He would not look again at Jim, but he went upstairs and carefully closed his door and sat down for a while upon his bed and wondered at the jealous pain and anger in his heart — and most of all his heart was sick because he could not forget the silly look upon Jim’s plain good face and Yuan was revolted at that look.

Thereafter he turned yet more proud. He told himself these white men and women were the loosest, lustiest race he ever heard of, and their whole inner thoughts were turned to each other wantonly. And when he thought this there rushed into his mind a hundred of the pictures in the theatres where they loved to go, the pictures blazoned on the highways of things to sell and always of some woman half unclothed. He could not, he thought bitterly, come back at night and not see an evil sight in any dark corner — some man who held a woman against him, their arms locked, hands touching in an evil way. Of such sights the town was full. And Yuan sickened at it all, and his very stomach turned proud within him at such coarseness everywhere.

Thereafter, he was never so near to Jim. When he heard Jim’s voice in the house somewhere he went silently alone up the stairs to his own room, and fell to his books and he was formal in his speech if Jim came in after a while, and very often he did so because, in some strange way Yuan could not understand, his feeling for the maid was no hindrance to his old friendship for Yuan, so that he was as hearty in his way and seemed not to see Yuan’s silence and aloofness. Sometimes, it is true, Yuan forgot the maid and let himself go free again in good talk and even jesting gently. But at least now he waited first for Jim to come to him. The old eager going out to meet him was no longer possible. Yuan said quietly to himself, “I am here if he wants me. I am not changed to him. Let him seek me if he wants me.” But he was changed, for all he said he was not. He was alone again.

To assuage himself Yuan began now to notice everything he did not like about this town and school, and every small thing he did not like came to fall like a sword-cut upon his raw heart. He heard the clatter of the foreign tongue among the crowds upon the street and he thought how harsh the voices were and the syllables, and not smooth and like the running waters of his own tongue. He marked the careless looks of students and their stammering speech before their teachers oftentimes, and he grew more jealous of himself and more careful even than he had been, and planned his own speech more perfectly, even though it was foreign to him, and he did his own work more perfectly than they did, and for his country’s sake.

Without knowing it he came to despise this race because he wanted to despise them, and yet he could not but envy them their ease and wealth and place and these great buildings and the many inventions they had made and all they had learned of the magic of air and wind and water and lightning. Yet their very wisdom and his very admiration made him like these people less. How had they stolen to such a place of power as this, and how could they be so confident of their own power and not know even how he hated them? One day he sat in the library poring over a certain very wonderful book, which marked out clearly for him how generations of plants could be foretold before even the seed was put into the ground, because the laws of their growth were known so clearly and this thing was so astonishing to Yuan, so far above men’s usual knowledge, that he could not but cry out secret admiration in his heart, and yet he thought most bitterly, “We have in our country been sleeping in our beds, the curtains drawn, thinking it still night and all the world asleep with us. But it has long been day, and these foreigners have been awake and working. … Shall we ever find what we have lost in all these years?”

Thus Yuan fell into great secret despairs in those six years, and these despairs put into him what the Tiger had begun, and Yuan determined that he would throw himself into his country’s cause as he never had, and he came to forget after a while that he was himself. He walked and talked among these foreigners and saw himself no longer as one Wang Yuan, but he saw himself as his people, and one who stood for his whole race in a foreign alien land.

There was only Sheng who could make Yuan feel young and not full of this mission. Sheng would not once in all the six years leave that great city he had chosen to live in. He said, “Why should I leave this place? There is more here than I can learn in a lifetime. I would rather know this place well than many places a little. If I know this city then I know this people, for this city is the mouthpiece of the whole race.”

So because Sheng would not come to Yuan and yet he would see Yuan, Yuan could not withstand his letters full of graceful, playful pleading, and so it came about that these two spent their summers in the city together, and Yuan slept in Sheng’s small sitting room, and sat and listened to the varied talk that was there often, and sometimes he added to it, but more often he kept silence, because Sheng soon saw how narrow Yuan’s life was and that he lived too much alone, and he did not spare Yuan what he thought.

With a new sharpness that Yuan did not know was in him Sheng told Yuan all he ought to know and see, and he said, “We in our country have worshipped books. You see where we are. But these people care less for books than any race on earth does. They care for the goods of life. They do not worship scholars — they laugh at them. Half their jokes are told of their teachers, and they pay them less than their servants are paid. Shall you then think to learn the secrets of this people from these old men alone? And is it well enough to learn of only a farmer’s son? You are too narrow-hearted, Yuan. You set yourself on one thing, one person, one place, and miss all else. Less than any people are these people to be found in their books. They gather books from all the world here in their libraries, and use them as they use stores of grain or gold — books are only materials for some plan they have. You may read a thousand books, Yuan, and learn nothing of the secret of their prosperity.”

Such things he said over and over to Yuan, and Yuan was very humble before Sheng’s ease and wisdom and he asked at last, “Then what ought I to do, Sheng, to learn more?” And Sheng said, “See everything — go everywhere, know all the kinds of people that you can. Let that small plot of land rest for a while and let books be. I have sat here listening to what you have learned. Now come and let me show you what I have learned.”

And Sheng looked so worldly, so sure in the way he sat and spoke and waved the ashes from his cigarette and smoothed down his shining black hair with his graceful ivory-colored hand that Yuan was abashed before him, and felt himself as raw a bumpkin as a man could be. It seemed to him in truth that Sheng knew far more than he did in everything. How much Sheng had changed from the slender dreamy pretty youth he had been! In the few years he had grown quick and vivid; he had bloomed forth into sureness of his beauty and faith in himself. Some heat had forced him. In the electric air of this new country, his indolence was gone. He moved, he spoke, he laughed as these others did, yet with this vividness were still left the grace and ease and inwardness of his own race and kind. And Yuan, seeing all that Sheng now was, thought surely there was never any man like him for beauty and for brilliance. He asked in great humility, “Do you still write the verses and the tales you did?”

And Sheng answered gaily, “I do, and more than I did. I have a group of poems now that I may make into a book. And I have hope of a prize or two for some tales I wrote.” This Sheng said not too proudly, but with the confidence of one who knows himself well. Yuan was silent. It seemed to him indeed that he had done very little. He was as cloddish as he had been when he came; he had no friends; all that he could point to for his life these many months was a pile of notebooks, and some seedling plants upon a strip of earth.

Once he asked Sheng, “What will you do when we go home again? Shall you always live there in the city?”

This Yuan asked to feel and see if Sheng were troubled as he was by his own people’s lack. But Sheng answered gaily and very surely, “Oh, always! I cannot live elsewhere. The truth is, Yuan, and we may say it here, what we cannot say before strangers, except in such cities there is no other fit place for men like us to live in our country. Where else can one find amusements fit for intelligence to enjoy, and where else cleanliness enough to live in? The little I remember of our village is enough to make me loathe it — the people filthy and the children naked in summer and the dogs savage and everything all black with flies — you know what it is — I cannot, will not, live elsewhere than in the city. After all, these western peoples have something to teach us in the way of comfort and of pleasure. Meng hates them, but I don’t forget that left alone for centuries we didn’t think of running clean water, or of electricity or motion pictures or any of these things. For me, I mean to have all good that I can and I shall live my life where it is best and easiest, and make my poems.”

“That is, to live it selfishly,” said Yuan bluntly.

“Have it so,” Sheng answered coolly. “But who is not selfish? We are all selfish. Meng is selfish in his very cause. That cause! Look at its leaders, Yuan, and dare to say they are not selfish — one was a robber once — one has shifted back and forth to this winning side and that — how does the third one live except upon the very money he collects for his cause? — No, to me it is more honorable to say straightly, I am selfish. I take this for myself. I take my comfort. So be it that I am selfish. But also I am not greedy. I love beauty. I need a delicacy about me in my house and circumstances. I will not live poorly. I only ask enough to surround myself with peace and beauty and a little pleasure.”

“And your countrymen who have no peace or pleasure?” Yuan asked, his heart seething in him.

“Can I help it?” Sheng replied. “Has it not been for centuries that the poor are born and famines come and wars break out, and shall I be so silly as to think that in my one life I can change it all? I would only lose myself in struggle, and in losing myself, my noblest self, this me — why should I struggle against a people’s fate? I might as well leap in the sea to make it dry up into productive land—”

Yuan could not answer such smoothness. That night he could only lie awhile after Sheng had gone to sleep and listen to the thunder of that vast changing city beating against the very walls against which he lay.

Thus listening he grew afraid. His mind’s eye, seeing through this little narrow wall of security between him and the strange dark roaring world beyond, saw too much and he could not bear his smallness and he clung to the good sense of Sheng’s words and to the warmth of the room lighted by the street light, and to the table and the chairs and the common things of life. There was this little spot of safety in the thousand miles of change and death and unknown life. Strange how Sheng’s sure choice of safety and of ease could make Yuan feel his dreams so great they were foolish to him! So long as he was near Sheng, Yuan was not himself somehow, not brave or full of hate even, but a child seeking certainty.

But Yuan could not always be thus closely and alone with Sheng. Sheng knew many in this city, and he went dancing many a night with any maid he could, and Yuan was alone even though he went with Sheng. At first he sat on the edge of all the merriment, wondering and half envious of Sheng’s beauty and his friendly manner, and his boldness with a woman. Sometimes he wondered if he might follow and then after a while he saw something which made him walk away and swear he would not speak to any woman.

And here was the reason. The women Sheng made friends with in this fashion were women not often of his own race. They were white women or they were mixed in blood, and partly dark and partly white. Now Yuan had never touched one of these women. He could not for some strange reason of the flesh. He had seen them often in the evenings when he had gone with Ai-lan, for in the coastal city people of every hue and shade mingled freely. But he had never taken one to him to dance with her. For one thing, they dressed in such a way as to him seemed shameless, for their backs were bare, and so bare that a man in dancing must place his hand on bare white flesh and this he could not do, because it made a sickness rise in his blood.

Yet now there was another reason why he would not. For as he watched Sheng and all the women who smiled and nodded when he came near them, it seemed to Yuan that only certain women smiled, and that the best, less shameless ones looked side-wise or away from Sheng when he came near and gave themselves only to the men of their own kind. The more Yuan looked, the more true this seemed, and it even seemed to him that Sheng knew this, too, and that he only took the ones whose smiles were sure and easy. And Yuan grew deeply angry for his cousin’s sake, and somehow for his own sake and for his country’s sake, although he did not understand fully why the women so behaved, and he was too shy and fearful of hurting Sheng to mention it, and he muttered in his own heart, “I wish Sheng were proud and would not dance with them at all. If he is not held good enough for the best of them, I wish he would scorn them all.”

And then Yuan was in an agony of hurt because Sheng was not proud enough and took his pleasure anyhow. Here was a strange thing, that all Meng’s angers against foreigners had not moved Yuan to hatred. But now seeing these proud women who looked sidewise when Sheng came near, Yuan felt that he could hate them and then that he did, and that because of these few he could hate all their kind. Then Yuan often went away and would not stay to see Sheng scorned and he spent his nights alone, at books, or staring into sky or into city streets and into the questions and confusions of his heart.

Patiently through these summers Yuan followed Sheng hither and thither in his life in that city. Sheng’s friends were many. He could not go into the restaurant where commonly he bought his food without some man or maid calling out most heartily, “Hello, Johnnie!” For this was what they called him. The first time Yuan heard it he was shocked at such freedom. He murmured to Sheng, “How do you bear this common name?” But Sheng only laughed and answered, “You should hear what they call each other! I am only glad they call me by so mild a name as this. Besides, they do it in friendship, Yuan. The ones they like best they speak of with the greatest freedom.”

And indeed it could be seen that Sheng had many friends. Into his room at night they came, twos and threes of friends, and sometimes twice as many. Piled together on Sheng’s bed or on the floor, smoking and talking, these young men strove each with the other to see who could think the wildest quickest thoughts and who could first confound what another had just said. Yuan never had heard such motley talk. Sometimes he thought them rebels against the government and feared for Sheng, until by some new wind the whole several hours’ talk might veer away from this and end in the cheerfulest acceptance of what was and in great scorn of any newness, and then these young men, reeking of their smoke and of the stuff they brought to drink, would shout their partings, grinning and content and with the mightiest relish for themselves and all the world. Sometimes they talked of women boldly, and Yuan, silent on a theme he knew so little of, — for what did he know except the touch of one maid’s hand? — sat listening, sick at what he heard. When they were gone he said to Sheng most gravely, “Can all we hear be true, and are there such evil, forward women as they say? Are all the women of this nation so — no chaste maids, no virtuous wives, no woman unassailable?” Then Sheng laughed teasingly and answered, “They are very young, these men — only students like you and me. And what do you know of women, Yuan?”

And Yuan answered humbly, “It is true, I do know nothing of them—”

Yet thereafter Yuan looked more often at these women whom he saw so freely on the streets. They, too, were part of these people. But he could make nothing of them. They walked quickly, were gay in garb and their faces were painted as gaily. Yet when their sweet bold eyes fell on Yuan’s face, the look was empty. They stared at him a second and passed on. To them he was not a man — only a stranger passing by, not worth the effort that a man was worth, their eyes said. And Yuan, not understanding this fully, yet felt the coldness and the emptiness and was shy to his soul. They moved so arrogantly, he thought, so coldly sure of their own worth, that he feared them greatly. Even in passing he took care not to touch one of them heedlessly in any way, lest anger come forth from the casual moment. For there was a shape to their reddened lips, a boldness in the way they held their shining heads, a swing their bodies had, which made him shrink away. He felt no lure of woman in them. Yet they did add their magic of living color to this city. For after days and nights Yuan could see why Sheng said these people were not in their books. One could not, Yuan perceived, his face upturned to the distant golden peak of one great building, put such a thing as that in books.

At first Yuan had seen no beauty in their buildings, his eye being trained to quiet latitudes of low tiled roofs and gentle slopes of houses. But now he saw beauty, — foreign beauty, it was true, yet beauty. And for the first time since he had come to this land, he felt a need to write a verse. One night in his bed, while Sheng slept, he struggled to shape his thought. Rhymes would not do, not usual, quiet rhymes, the rhymes he once had made of fields and clouds. He needed sharp words, rough-edged and cleanly pointed. The words of his own tongue he could not use, they were so round and smooth with long polished use. No, he must search out other words in this newer, foreign tongue. And yet they were like new tools to him, too heavy for his own wielding, and he was not accustomed to their form and sound. And so at last he gave it up. He could not shape the verse and there it lay unshaped in his mind to make him a little restless for a day or two, and longer, because at last he came to feel that if he could but shape it out of him, he could have caught between his hands the meaning of these people. But he could not. They kept their souls away from him and he moved only here and there among their swift bodies.

Now Sheng and Yuan were two very different souls. Sheng’s soul was like the rhymes which flowed so easily out from it. He showed these rhymes to Yuan one day, beautifully written on thick paper edged with gold, and said with pretended carelessness, “They are nothing, of course — not my best work. That I shall do some later day. These are only fragments of this country put down as they came to me. But my teachers give me praise for them.”

Yuan read them carefully, one by one, in silence and reverence. To him they seemed beautiful, each word well chosen fitted to its place as neatly as a stone set in a ring of gold embossed with gold. There were some of these verses, Sheng said lightly, which had even been set to music by a certain woman whom he knew. One day after he had spoken a time or two of this woman he took Yuan to her home to hear the music she had made of Sheng’s verses, and here Yuan saw another sort of woman still, and still another life of Sheng’s.

She was a singer in some hall, not quite a common singer, but still not so great by far as she conceived herself to be. She lived alone in a house where many others lived, each in his own little home in the great house. The room which she had made for herself to live in was dark and still. Although outside the sun shone brightly no sun came here. Candles burned in tall bronze stands. A scent of incense hung heavily upon the thick air. There was no seat hard or uncushioned, and at one end a great divan stretched. Here on this bed the woman lay, a long, fair woman, whose age was inscrutable to Yuan. She cried out when she saw Sheng, waving a holder that she held to smoke by, and she said, “Sheng, darling, I haven’t seen you in ages!”

When Sheng sat easily beside her, as though he had sat there many times before, she cried again, and her voice was deep and strange and not like a woman’s voice, “That lovely thing of yours—‘Temple Bells’—I’ve finished it! I was just going to call you up—”

When Sheng said, “This is my cousin Yuan,” she scarcely looked at Yuan. She was rising as Sheng spoke, her long legs careless as a child’s, and with the holder in her mouth she flung a twisted word or two, “Oh, hello, Yuan!” and seeming not to see him, went to the instrument she had and laying down the thing from out her mouth, began to slide her fingers slowly from one handful of notes to another — deep, slow notes such as Yuan did not know. Soon she began to sing, her voice deep as the music her hands made, shaking a little, very passionately.

The thing she sang was short, a little verse of Sheng’s he had once written in his own country, but the music changed it, somehow. For Sheng had shaped the words wistfully and slightly, as slightly as bamboos shadowed in the moonlight on a temple walk But this foreign woman singing these pretty little words made them passionate, the shadows black and hard, the moonlight hot. And Yuan was troubled, feeling the frame of music was too heavy for the picture the words made. But so the woman was. Every movement she made was full of troubled meaning — every word and every look not simple.

Suddenly Yuan did not like her. He did not like the room she lived in. He did not like her eyes too dark for the fairness of her hair. He did not like her looks at Sheng, nor how she called him by the name of “darling” many times, nor how when she had made the music she walked about and touched Sheng often as she passed him, nor how she brought the music to him written down and leaned over him and once even laid her cheek against his hair and murmured in her casual negligent fashion, “Your hair’s not painted on, is it, darling? It shines so smoothly always—”

And Yuan sitting in completest silence felt some gorge in him rise against this woman, some healthy gorge his old grandfather had given him, and his father, too, a simple knowledge that what this woman did and said and how she looked were not seemly. He looked to Sheng to repulse her, even gently to repulse her. But Sheng did not. He did not touch her, it is true, or answer her words with like words, or in any way put out his hand to meet her hand. But he accepted what she did and said. When her hand lay upon his for an instant, he let it lie, and did not draw away from her as Yuan wished he would. When she sent her gaze into his eyes, he looked back, half laughing but accepting all her boldness and her flattery until Yuan could scarcely stomach what he saw. He sat as large and stolid as an image, seeming to see nothing and hear nothing, until Sheng rose. Even then the woman clung to his arm with her two hands, coaxing Sheng to come to some dinner that she gave, saying, “Darling, I want to show you off, you know — your verses are something new — you’re something new yourself — I love the Orient — the music’s rather nice, too, isn’t it? I want the crowd to hear it — not too many, you know — only a few poets and that Russian dancer — darling, here’s an idea — she could do a dance to the music — a sort of Oriental thing — your verses would be divine to dance to — let’s try it—” So she continued coaxing until Sheng took her two hands in his own and put them down and promised what she wished, seeming reluctant, yet as Yuan could see, only seeming.

When they were out away from her at last Yuan breathed in a time or two and out again and looked about him gladly at the honest sunshine. They two were silent for a while, Yuan fearing to speak lest he offend Sheng in what he thought, and Sheng absorbed in some thinking of his own, a little smile upon his face. At last Yuan said, half trying Sheng, “I never heard such words upon a woman’s tongue before. I scarcely know such words. Does she then love you so well?”

But Sheng laughed at this and answered, “Those words mean nothing. She uses them to any man — it is a way such women have. The music is not bad, though. She gets my mood.” And Yuan, looking now at Sheng, saw on his face a look Sheng did not know was there. It was a look which plainly said that Sheng somehow liked those sweet and idle words the woman had said, and he liked her praise of him and liked the flattery of his verses which her music made. Yuan said no more then. But to himself he said that Sheng’s way was not his, nor Sheng’s life his, and his own way for him was best, though what his way was, he scarcely knew, except it was not this way.

Therefore, though Yuan stayed on awhile in that city and its sights to please his cousin, and saw its subterranean trains and all the streets of show, he knew that in spite of what Sheng said, not all of life was here. His own life was not here. He was lonely. There was nothing here that he knew or understood, or so he thought.

Then one day when it was very hot, and Sheng was indolent with heat and lay asleep, Yuan wandered forth alone, and riding on a public vehicle or two, he came into a region he had not dreamed was here in such a city. For he had been surfeited with its richness. To him the buildings were palaces, and every man took for matter of course that he had all he would of food and drink and garments and his needs were not for these things, for they were his due and only to be expected. Beyond these were the needs of pleasure and of better garments and food made not to live by but to take zest in. Thus were all the citizens of this city or so it seemed to Yuan.

But upon this day he found himself in another city, a city of the poor. He stumbled on it, unknowing, and suddenly it was everywhere about him. These were the poor. He knew them. Though their faces were pale and white, though some were black-skinned as the savages are, he knew them. By their eyes, by the filth upon their bodies, by their dirty scaly hands, by the loud screams of women and the cries of too many children, he knew them. There in his memory were the other poor he knew, very far away in another city, but how like these! He said to himself, recognizing them, “Then this great city, too, is built upon a city of the poor!” Ai-lan and her friends came out at midnight into such men and women as these were.

Yuan thought to himself, and with a sort of triumph, “These people, too, hide their poor! In this rich city, crowded secretly into these few streets, are these poor, as filthy as any to be seen in any country!”

Here then Yuan truly found something not in books. He walked among these people in a daze, staring into narrow shadowed rooms, choosing his footsteps among the garbage of the streets, where starved children ran half naked in the heat. Lifting up his head to look at misery on misery he thought, “It does not matter that they live in lofty houses — they live in hovels still — the same hovels—”

He went back at last, when darkness fell, and entered into the cool lit darkness of the other streets. When he came into Sheng’s room, Sheng was gay again, awake, and ready with a friend or two to sally forth into the street of theatres to make merry there.

When he saw Yuan he cried out, “Where have you been, cousin? I nearly feared you lost.”

And Yuan answered slowly, “I have seen some of the life you told me was not in the books. … Then all the wealth and strength of these people still cannot keep away the poor.” And he told where he had been and a little of what he saw. And one of Sheng’s friends said, careful as a judge, “Some day, of course, we will solve the problem of poverty.” And the other said, “Of course if these people were capable of more they would have more. They are defective somehow. There is always room at the top.”

Then Yuan spoke out quickly, “The truth is you hide your poor — you are ashamed of them as a man is ashamed of some secret vile disease—”

But Sheng said gaily, “We’ll be late if we let this cousin start us on this talk! The play begins in half an hour!”

In those six years Yuan came near to three others who befriended him among all the strangers among whom he lived. There was a certain old teacher he had, a white-haired man, whose face Yuan early liked to see because it was very kindly marked by gentle thoughts and perfect ways of life. To Yuan this old man showed himself, when time went on, as more than a teacher only. He spent willingly much time in special talk with Yuan, and he read the notes Yuan wrote in planning for a book he hoped to write, and with very mild correction he pointed out a place or two where Yuan was wrong. Whenever Yuan spoke he listened, his blue eyes so smiling and so filled with understanding that Yuan came at length to trust him greatly and at further length to tell him inward things.

He told him, among much else, how he had seen the poor in the city, and how he wondered that in the midst of such vast riches the poor could live so desperately. And this led him on to talk of the foreign priest and how he had besmirched Yuan’s people by his vile pictures. The old man listened to it all in his mild silent way and then he said, “I think not everyone can see the whole picture. It has long been said we each see what we look for. You and I, we look at land and think of seed and harvests. A builder looks at the same land and thinks of houses, and a painter of its colors. The priest sees men only as those who need to be saved, and so naturally he sees most clearly those who need to be saved.”

And after Yuan had thought of this awhile, unwillingly he knew it to be true, and in all fairness he could not quite hate the foreign priest as wholly as he did, or even as he wished he could, for still he thought him wrong, and still he said, “At least, he saw a very narrow part of my country.” To which the old man answered always mildly, “That might be, and must be if he were a narrow man.”

Through talk like this in field and schoolroom after others had gone home, Yuan learned to love this old white man. And he loved Yuan and looked on him with increasing tenderness.

One day he said to Yuan, half hesitating, “I wish you would come with me tonight, my son. We are very simple folk — only my wife and my daughter Mary and I — we three — but if you will come and take your supper with us, we’ll be glad. I’ve told them so much about you, they want to know you, too.”

This was the first time anyone had spoken thus to Yuan, in, these years, and he was very moved by it. It seemed a warm and special thing to him that a teacher would take a pupil to his private home. He said shyly therefore in the courteous way of his own tongue, “I am not worthy.”

To which the old man opened his eyes wide and smiled and said, “Wait until you see how plain we are! My wife said when I first told her it would be a pleasure to me if you came, ‘I’m afraid he’s used to much better than we have.’ ”

Then Yuan protested again in courtesy and yielded. Thus he found himself walking down the shaded street into a small square court-like yard, and thence to an ancient wooden house, standing back in trees, and set about with porches. There at the door a lady met him who made him think of the lady whom he called his mother. For in these two women, ten thousand miles apart, who spoke two different tongues, whose blood and bones and skin were not alike, there was yet a common look. The white smoothed hair, their full settled look of motherhood, their simple ways and honest eyes, their quiet voices, the wisdom and the patience graven on their lips and brows, these made them like. Yet it was true there was a difference in the two which Yuan could perceive after they were seated in the large main room, for about this lady there was an air of contentment and simple satisfaction of the soul which his lady mother had not. It was as if this one had her heart’s desire in her lifetime, but the other had not. By two roads the two had come to a good tranquil age, but the one had come by a happy road and with companionship, while the other had come by a darker way and she walked alone.

But when this lady’s daughter came in, she was not like Ai-lan. No, this Mary was a different sort of maid. She was, perhaps, a little more in years than Ai-lan was, much taller and not so pretty, very quiet, seemingly, and governed in her voice and look. Yet when one listened to the words she spoke, there was sense in all she said and her dark, grey-black eyes, somber in hue when she was grave, could flash out merrily to match a witty twist her words might take. She was demure before her parents, yet not afraid, and they deferred to her as to an equal, and Yuan perceived this.

Indeed Yuan saw very soon she was no common maid. For when the old man talked of what Yuan wrote, this Mary knew of it, too, and put a question so quickly and so aptly before Yuan that he was taken aback and asked her, wondering, “How is it that you know the history of my people so well that you can ask me of one so far away in history as Ch’ao Tso?”

To this the maid answered modestly but with a shine of smiling in her eyes. “Oh, I have always had a kinship with your land, I think. I have read books about it. Shall I tell you the very little I know about him? Then you will know I am a sham! I really know nothing. But he wrote about agriculture, didn’t he? — in an essay. I remember I memorized a bit I read once in a translation. It was something like this, ‘Crime begins in poverty; poverty in insufficiency of food; insufficiency in neglect of tilling of the soil. Without such tilling, man has no tie to bind him to the soil. Without such a tie he readily leaves his birthplace and his home. Then he is like the birds of the air or the beasts of the field. Neither battlemented cities nor deep moats, nor harsh laws, nor cruel punishments, can subdue this roving spirit that is strong within him.’ ”

These words, which Yuan knew very well, this maid now chanted in a round clear voice, for her voice was very full of meaning. It could be seen she loved the words, because a gravity came upon her face and into her eyes a mystery, as of one who again perceives beauty known before. Her parents listened reverently and in pride while she spoke and the old father turned to Yuan as one who cries out in his heart, only keeping back the words in decent courtesy, “Do you see what my child is for wisdom and intelligence, and have you seen one like her?”

Yuan could not but speak out his pleasure, and hereafter when she spoke he listened, too, and felt a kinship with her, because whatever she said, even if she said a small thing, was said fitly and well, and as he would have liked to have said it in her place.

Yet though he felt so used to this house he had entered for the first time this night, so used to these people that he forgot they were not of his kind, yet every now and again there came a strangeness of some sort, a foreign thing he did not understand. When they entered into a smaller room and sat about an oval table spread for the meal, Yuan took up his spoon to eat. But he saw the others hesitate, and then the old man bowed his head and so did the others except Yuan, who did not understand the thing, and while he looked from one to the other, to see what would happen, the old man spoke aloud as though to some god not to be seen, a few words only, but said with feeling, as though he thanked one for a gift received. After this, without further rite, they ate, and Yuan asked nothing at that time, but he gave and received in talk.

But afterwards, being very curious about this rite and never having seen it heretofore, he asked his teacher of it as they sat alone in the twilight on the wide veranda, and he asked so he might know what the courteous thing was he should do at such a time. Then the old man fell silent for a while, smoking his pipe and looking peacefully away into the shadowed street. At last he held his pipe in the cup of his hand and said, “Yuan, I have many times wondered how to speak to you of our religion. What you saw is a religious rite we have, a simple giving thanks to God for food daily set before us. In itself it is not important and yet it is a symbol of the greatest thing our lives hold — our belief in God. Do you remember you spoke of our prosperity and power? I believe it is the fruit of our religion. I do not know what your religion is, Yuan, but I know I should not be true to my own self or to you if I should let you live here and daily come and go in my classes and come often, I hope, to my home, and not tell you of my own faith.”

While the old man spoke thus, the two women came out and seated themselves there, the mother on a chair in which she rocked gently to and fro as though a wind were blowing it. There she sat listening to her husband, a mild agreeing smile upon her face, and when he paused a moment, for he went on to talk of gods and mysteries of gods made human flesh, she cried out with a sort of gentle passion, “Oh, Mr. Wang, ever since Dr. Wilson told me how brilliant you are in his classes, how able in all you write, I have counted you for Christ. What a great thing it would be for your country if you could be somehow won for Christ and go back to bear good witness!”

This gave Yuan great astonishment, for he did not know what all these words meant But being courteous he smiled merely and bowed a little and was even about to speak when Mary’s voice broke out sharp and clear as metal, and with a tone Yuan had not heard in it before. She had not sat herself in a chair but on the uppermost step and she had sat there silent while her father had talked, holding her chin in her two hands and listening seemingly. Now out of the dim light her voice came restless, strange, impatient, cutting like a knife across the talk, “Shall we go inside, father? The chairs will be more comfortable — and I like the light—”

To which the old man answered in a vague surprise, “Why yes, Mary, if you wish. But I thought you always liked to sit here of an evening. Every night we sit here awhile—”

But the young woman answered still more restlessly and with a sort of willfulness, “Tonight I want the light, father.”

“Very well, my dear,” the old man said, and rose slowly and so they went within.

There in the lighted room he spoke no more of mysteries. Instead his daughter led the talk, plying Yuan with a hundred questions of his own country, so quick and deep sometimes that he must in all honesty confess himself confounded by his own ignorance. And while she talked, he could not but feel a pleasure in her. For though he knew she was not beautiful, her face was keen and quickened, and the skin was delicate and very white, her lips narrow and a little red, and her hair was smooth and very nearly like his own in blackness, but much finer than his was. Her eyes he saw were beautiful, now near black with earnestness, then changing to a lovely shining grey when she smiled, and she smiled often though she did not laugh aloud. Her hands spoke, too, being very restless, supple, slender hands, not small, and perhaps too thin and not smooth enough for beauty but nevertheless with a sort of power in their look and movement.

But Yuan took no pleasure in these things for themselves. For he saw she was one whose body seemed a thing not of itself but only a covering for her mind and soul. And this was new to Yuan, who had known no such woman. When he thought he saw a sudden beauty in her as suddenly it was gone and he forgot it in the flash of light her mind sent out or in a witty word her tongue spoke. The body was informed here by the mind, and the mind did not spend itself in thoughts upon the body. So Yuan saw her scarcely as a woman, but as a being, changeful, shining, eager, sometimes a little cold, even, and often suddenly silent Yet not silent out of emptiness, only silent while her mind took hold of something that he said and pulled it delicately apart to question what it was. In such silence she often did forget herself and forgot that her eyes were still on Yuan’s eyes, though he had finished speaking, so that in such silence more than once he found himself looking deep and deeper into the soft changing darkening blackness of her eyes.

Not once did she speak of mysteries nor did the elder two again either, until at last when Yuan rose to take his leave the old man clinging to his hand a little said, “If you wish, son, come to church with us next Sunday and see how you like it.”

And Yuan, taking this as further kindness, said he would, and this he said more willingly because he felt it would be a very pleasant thing to see these three again, who made him like a son in the house, who was not even of their race or kind.

Now after Yuan had gone back to his room, when he lay in his bed waiting for sleep, he thought about these three and most of all he thought about the daughter of the old two. Here was a woman such as he had not seen. She was of a material different from any he had known, a stuff more shining than Ai-lan, and this in spite of all of Ai-lan’s mirth and pretty kitten’s eyes and little laughters. This white woman, though grave often, had some strong inner light, at times too hard, if one compared her to the vague soft kindness of her mother, but always clear. She made no misdirected movement, even, of her body. There were in her none of the constant useless movements of the body only, such as the landlady’s daughter made continually to show her thigh or wrist or foot more clearly forth, blind movements of the flesh. Nor were her words, nor was her voice like that one’s, who had set Sheng’s pretty words to heavy, passionate music. For this Mary’s words were not surcharged with oversubtle meaning. No, she spoke them out swiftly and with sharp clearness and each word had its own weight and meaning and no more, good tools of her mind, but not messengers of vague suggestion.

When Yuan thought of her he remembered most her spirit, clothed in color and in substance of her flesh, but not hidden by it. And he fell to thinking of what she said and how she said sometimes things he had not thought upon. Once she said, when they spoke of love of country, “Idealism and enthusiasm are not the same thing. Enthusiasm may be only physical — the youth and strength of body making the spirit gay. But idealism may live on, though the body be aged or broken, for it is the essential quality of the soul which has it.” And then her face had changed in its quick, lighting way and looking at her father very tenderly, she said, “My father has real idealism, I think.”

And the old man answered quietly, “I call it faith, my child.”

To which Yuan now remembered she had answered nothing.

And so thinking of these three he fell asleep in more content of soul than he had ever had in this foreign country, for to him they seemed actual and to be comprehended.

When the day came, therefore, for the religious rites of which the old teacher had spoken Yuan dressed himself with care in his better garments and again he went to the house. At first he felt some timidity, because the door opened and there Mary stood. It was plain she was surprised to see him, for her eyes darkened and she did not smile. She was moreover clothed in a long blue coat and a small hat of the same hue, and she seemed taller than Yuan remembered her and somehow touched with an austerity. Therefore he stammered forth, “Your father invited me to go with him to his religious place today.”

She answered gravely, searching out his eyes with some troubled look within her own, “I know he did. Will you come in? We are almost ready.”

So Yuan went in again to the room where he had remembered such good friendship. But this morning it did not seem so friendly to him. There was no fire burning on the hearth as there had been that night, and the hard cold sunshine of the autumn morning fell through the windows and showed the wornness of the rugs upon the floor and of the stuffs upon the chairs, so that whereas by night and firelight and lamplight what had looked dark and homely and used, by this stern sunshine seemed too worn and aged and needing newness.

Yet the old man and his lady were very kind when they came in, clothed decently for their devotions, as kind as they had been. The old man said, “I am so glad you came. I did not speak again, because I do not want to influence you unduly.”

But the lady said in her soft, overflowing way, “But I have prayed! I prayed you would be led to come. I pray about you every night, Mr. Wang. If God will grant my prayer how proud it will make me, if through us—”

Then sharp as a ray of the piercing sunlight across the old room the daughter’s voice fell, a pleasant voice, not unkind, but very clear and perfect in its tone, a little colder yet than Yuan had heard it, “Shall we go now? We have just time to get there.”

She led them out and sat herself by the guiding wheel in the car which was to take them to the place they went. The old two sat behind, but Yuan she placed beside her. Yet she did not say any word while she turned the wheel this way and that. And Yuan, being courteous, did not speak, either, nor did he even look at her, except as he might turn his head to see a strange sight passed. Yet, without looking straightly at her, he saw her face sidewise against and in front of that which he looked. There was no smile or light in that face now. It was grave even to a sort of sadness, the straight nose not small, the sharply cut, delicately folded lips, the clearly rounded chin lifted out of a dark fur upon her collar, her grey eyes set direct and far upon the road ahead. As she was now, turning the wheel quickly and well, sitting there straight and silent, Yuan was even a little afraid of her. She seemed not that one with whom he had once spoken freely and easily.

Thus they came to a great house into which many men and women and even children were passing. With these they entered and seated themselves, Yuan between the old man and the young woman. Yuan could not but look about him curiously for this was only the second time he had been in such a temple. Temples in his own land he had seen often, but they were for the common and the unlearned, and for women, and he had never worshipped any god in his life. A few times he had entered for curiosity and stared at the vast images, and had listened to the deep warning solitary note the great bell gave forth when it was struck, and he had seen with contempt the grey-robed priests, for his tutor taught him early that such priests were evil and ignorant men who preyed upon the people. So Yuan had never worshipped any god.

Now in this foreign temple he sat and watched. It was a cheerful place, and through long narrow windows the early autumn sunshine streamed in great bars of light, falling upon flowers at an altar, upon the gay garments of women, upon many faces of varied meaning, although not of many young. Soon music flowed out into the air from some unknown source, at first very soft music, then gradually growing in sound and volume until all the air was throbbing with that music. Yuan, turning his head to see what its source was, saw beside him the figure of the old man, his head bowed before him, his eyes closed, upon his face a smile, sweet, ecstatic. And Yuan, looking about, observed others also in this bound speechless silence, and in courtesy he wondered what he should do. But when he looked at Mary, he saw her sitting as she had been at the wheel, straight and proud, her chin lifted, and her eyes opened and fixed in the distance. When he saw her sitting thus, Yuan also therefore did not bow his head in any unknown worship.

Now, remembering what the old man had said, that in the power of their religion these people had found their strength, Yuan watched to know what this power was. But he could not easily discover it. For when the grave music fell soft once more and at last withdrew itself into the place where it hid, a robed priest came out and read certain words to which all seemed to listen decorously, although Yuan, observing, could see that some paid heed to their garments or to others’ faces or to some such thing. But the old man and his lady listened carefully, although Mary, her face still set as to a far distance, did not change her look with anything she heard so that Yuan could not know if indeed she listened. Again and again there was music, and there was chanting of words Yuan could not understand, and the robed priest exhorted those in the temple out of the great book from which he had read.

To this Yuan listened, and it seemed a good harmless exhortation by a pleasant, holy man who urged his countrymen to be more kindly to the poor and to deny themselves and to obey their god, and such talk he made as priests do anywhere.

When he had finished, he bade them bow while he cried out a prayer to this god. Again Yuan looked to see what he should do, and again he saw the old pair bow themselves in their devotion. And again the woman by him held her proud head high, and therefore he also did not bow. He held his eyes open and looked to see if any image would be brought form by the priest, since the people were bowed ready to worship. But the priest brought forth no image and no god was seen anywhere, and after a time when he had finished his speaking, the people waited no more for the god to come, but stirred and rose and went to their homes, and Yuan went back also to his own place, not understanding anything of what he had seen or heard, and out of all of it remembering most the clear line of that proud woman’s head, which had not bowed itself.

Yet out of this day grew the next new thing in Yuan’s life. For one day when he returned to his room from the field where he was now planting seeds of winter wheat, to see which did best in various rows where he placed them, he found a letter upon his table. Letters were very rare in Yuan’s solitary life in this foreign country. Once in three months he knew his father’s letter would lie on that table, each time its letters brushed to say the same words nearly, that the Tiger did well, but rested until next spring when he would go out to war again, that Yuan must study hard at what he wished most to know, and that he must come home as soon as his years of study were complete, since he was only son. Or else a letter might lie there from the lady, Ai-lan’s mother, a quiet good letter, telling small things that she did, how Ai-lan she thought was to be wed, now three times promised, by her own will, but each time willfully refusing to be wed to the one promised, so that Yuan smiled a little when he read of Ai-lan’s willfulness, and when the mother had spoken of it, she often added as though for her own comfort, “But Mei-ling is my stay. I have taken her into the home with us, and she learns so well and does everything so rightly, and is so filled with every proper sense of fitness, that almost she might be the child I should have had, and sometimes more my daughter than my Ai-lan is.”

Such letters Yuan could look for, and once or twice Ai-lan had written, letters mixed in two languages and full of willfulness and teasing and pretty threats if Yuan did not bring her back some western baubles, and vows that she expected perhaps a western sister-in-law. Or Sheng might write, but very seldom and never surely, and Yuan knew, half sadly, that his life was filled with all the many things a young man has who is beautiful in body and skilled in pretty speech, whose foreignness added grace to him in the eyes of those city dwellers who sought restlessly and everywhere for every new thing they could find.

But this letter was none of these. It lay white and square upon the table and his name was there marked clearly in black ink. So Yuan opened it, and it was from Mary Wilson. There her name was, plain and large at the bottom, yet with an energy and keenness in its shape, and very far from the rude letters that the landlady shaped upon her monthly bills. The letter asked Yuan to come for a special purpose on any day he could, since she who wrote it had been troubled since the day they went to church together, and had something unsaid which she wanted said, so she could be free of it toward Yuan.

Then Yuan, wondering very much, dressed himself in his dark better clothes and washed himself free of the stain of earth and that night when he had eaten he went out. And as he went his landlady cried out after him that she had put a letter from a lady on his table that day, and now she reckoned that he went to see her. And all the company laughed aloud, and the young girl laughed loudest of them all. But Yuan said nothing. He was only angry that this rude laughter should come even as near as this to Mary Wilson, who was too high for such as these to touch her name. And Yuan felt his heart grow hot against them and he swore to himself that none should ever hear her name from him, and he wished he had not that laughter and these looks even in his mind when he went to her.

But there the memory was, and it put a constraint upon him when he stood again before that door, so that when the door opened and she stood there, he was cool and shy and did not touch her hand when she put it warmly forth, but feigned he did not see it, he was so fastidious against the coarseness of those others. And she felt his coolness. A light went from her face, and she put away the little smile she had to greet him, and asked him gravely to come in and her voice was quiet and cool.

But when he went in the room was as it had been that first evening, warm and intimate and lit with the flames that burned upon the hearth. The old deep chairs invited him and the very stillness and the emptiness received him.

Nevertheless Yuan waited to see where she would seat herself, so that he might not be more near her than he ought to be, and she, not looking at him, dropped with a careless grace upon a low stool before the fire, and motioned to a great chair near. But Yuan, as he sat in it, contrived to push it back somewhat, so that while he was near to her, near enough so that he could see her face clearly, yet, if he put forth a hand, or if she did, their hands could not touch each other. So he wished to have it, and know more surely that the laughter of those common folk was coarse laughter only.

Thus these two sat alone. Of the old pair there was nothing seen or heard. But without telling of them, the woman began to speak directly and with abruptness, as if what she said was hard to say, and yet necessary to be spoken. “Mr. Wang, you will think it strange of me that I asked you to come here tonight. We are really strangers, almost. And yet I have read so much about your country — you know I work in the library — and I know a little of your people and admire them a great deal. I asked you here, not only for your own sake, but for your sake as a Chinese. And I speak to you as a modern American to a modern Chinese.”

Here she paused, and gazed awhile into the fire, and at last took up a little twig caught among a heap of logs upon the hearth, and with this she stirred half idly the red coals which lay beneath the burning logs. And Yuan waited, wondering what was to be said, and not wholly easy with her, since he was not used to being alone with a woman, until she went on.

“The truth is I have been much embarrassed by my parents’ efforts to interest you in their religion. Of them I say nothing, except they are the best people I have ever known. You know my father — you see — anyone can see — what he is. People talk of saints. He is one. I have never seen him angry or unkind in all my life. No girl, no woman, ever had better parents. The only trouble is that my father, if he did not give me his goodness, did give me his brain. In my time I have used that brain, and it has turned against the religion, the energy that feeds my father’s life, really, so that I myself have no belief in it. I cannot understand how men like my father, with strong, keen intellect, do not use it upon their religion. His religion satisfies his emotional needs. His intellectual life is outside religion, and — there is no passage between the two. … My mother, of course, is not an intellectual. She is simpler — easier to understand. If father were like her, I should be merely amused when they try to make a Christian out of you — I should know they never could.”

Now the woman turned her honest eyes straight upon Yuan, and let her hands grow still, the twig hanging in her fingers, and looking at him she grew still more earnest. “But — I am afraid — father may influence you. I know you admire him. You are his pupil. You study the books he has written, he has been attracted to you as he seldom has been to any pupil. I think he has a sort of vision of you going back to your country as a great Christian leader. Has he told you he once wanted to be a missionary? He belongs to the generation when every good earnest boy or girl was faced with the — the missionary call, as it was named. But he was engaged to my mother, and she wasn’t strong enough to go. I think both of them have felt ever since a sense of — of some frustration. … Strange, how generations differ! We feel the same thing about you, they and I”—there were her deep lovely eyes, looking straight into his, unashamed, with no coquetry—“and yet how we differ! They feel because you are what you are, how glorious to win you to their cause! To me, how presumptuous to think you could be made more than you are — by a religion! You are of your own race and your own time. How can anyone dare to impose upon you what is foreign to you?”

These words she said with a sort of ardor streaming from her, and Yuan was stirred, but not grossly, towards her. For she seemed to see him not only as himself, one man, but as one of his whole race. It was as though through him she spoke to millions. Between them was a wall of delicacy, of mind, of a withdrawal native to them both. And he said gratefully, “I understand very well what you mean. It doesn’t, I promise you, weaken any admiration I feel for your father to know he believes a thing my mind cannot accept.”

Her eyes were turned upon the flames again. The fire had sunk into coals and ashes, and the glow was steadier now upon her face and hair, upon her hands, upon the dark red of her dress. She said thoughtfully, “Who could not admire him? It was a hard thing for me, I can tell you, to put aside my childish faith in what he had taught me. But I was honest with him — I could be — and we talked again and again. I couldn’t talk to mother at all — she always began to weep, and that made me impatient. But father met me at every point — and we could talk — he always respected my disbelief, and I always respected — more and more — his faith. We would reason very much alike up to a certain point — when the intellect must stop and one must begin to believe without understanding. There we parted. He could take that at a leap — frankly believing, in faith and hope — I couldn’t. My generation can’t.”

Suddenly and with energy she rose and taking a log flung it upon the bed of coals. A mass of sparks flew up the wide black chimney, and again a blaze burst forth, and again Yuan saw her shining in the fresh light. She turned to him, standing above him, leaning against the mantel, saying seriously, yet with a little half smile at the corners of her mouth, “I think that’s what I wanted to say — that sums it up. Don’t forget that I do not believe. When my parents try to influence you, remember their generation — it is not mine — not yours and mine.”

Yuan rose, too, very grateful, and as he stood beside her, thinking what to say, words came up unexpectedly out of him, which were not what he would have planned to say.

“I wish,” he said slowly, looking at her, “that I could speak to you in my own language. For I find your speech never wholly natural to me. You have made me forget we are not one race.Somehow, for the first time since I entered your country I have felt a mind speaking to my mind without a barrier.”

This he said honestly and simply, and she looked back at him as straight as a child, their eyes level to each other’s, and she answered quietly, but very warmly, “I believe we shall be friends — Yuan?”

And Yuan answered, half timidly and as though he put his foot out to step upon an unknown shore, not knowing where he stepped or what was there, but still he must step forth, “If this is your wish—” and then still looking at her he added, his voice very low with shyness—“Mary.”

She smiled then, a quick, brilliant, playful smile, accepting what he said and then stopping him as clearly as though she spoke the words “We have said enough for this day.” They spoke then for a while of small things in books or elsewhere until their were steps heard upon the porch and she said at once, “Here they come — my precious two. They went to prayer meeting — they go every Wednesday night.”

And she walked swiftly to the door and opened it and welcomed the old two, who came in, their faces fresh and reddened by the chilly autumn air. Soon they were all before the fire, and more than ever they made Yuan one of them, and bade him sit down again, while Mary brought fruit and the hot milk they loved to drink before they slept. And Yuan, though his soul loathed the milk, yet took it and sipped a little of it to feel more one with them, until Mary perceived how it was and laughed and said, “Why didn’t I remember?” And she brewed a pot of tea and gave it to him, and they made a little merriment about it.

But the moment which afterwards Yuan thought of most was this. In a pause of talk, the mother sighed and said, “Mary dear, I wish you had wanted to come tonight. It was a good meeting. I think Dr. Jones spoke so well — didn’t you, Henry? — about having faith enough to carry us even through the greatest trials.” And then she said kindly to Yuan, “You must feel very lonely often, Mr. Wang. I often think how hard it must be to be so far from your dear parents and they, too, how hard it is for them to let you be so far. If you feel you’d like it, we’d love to have you take supper with us Wednesdays and go to church with us.”

Then Yuan, perceiving how kindly she was, said only “Thank you,” and as he said it his eyes fell on Mary, who sat again upon the stool, so now her eyes were beneath the level of his own, and very near. And there in her eyes and upon her face he saw a lovely tender half-merry meaning, tender towards the mother, but very comprehending too toward Yuan, so that this look bound them together in a sort of mutual understanding, wherein they two were quite alone.

Thereafter Yuan lived with a sense of secret, hidden richness. No longer was this people alien to him wholly nor its ways altogether strange and often he forgot he hated them, and he thought he had not so many slights put on him as before, either. He had now two gateways whereby to enter. The one was the outer gateway, and it was this one house into which he could come and go always with freedom and welcome. The worn brown room became home to him in this foreign place. He had thought his loneliness very sweet and the thing he wanted most, yet now he came to this further knowledge, and it was that loneliness is only sweet to a man if it rids him of presences irksome and unwanted, and it is no longer sweet when the beloved presences are discovered. Here in this room did Yuan discover such beloved presences.

There were the little presences of used books, seeming so small and silent, and yet when sometimes he came alone into this room, and sat alone, the house being empty for the time, he took up a book and he found himself spoken to most mightily. For here books spoke more nearly to him than they did anywhere, because the room enfolded him in learned quiet and in friendliness.

And there was here often the beloved presence of his old teacher. Here more than in any classroom or even in the fields Yuan came to know the full beauty of this man. The old man had lived a very simple childlike life, a farmer’s son, a student, then a teacher, many years, and he knew so little of the world that one would say he had not lived in it. Yet did he live in two worlds of mind and spirit, and Yuan, exploring into those two worlds with many questions and long listening silences when he sat and heard the old man speak out his knowledge and beliefs, felt no narrowness here, but the wide ranging simple vastness of a mind unlimited by time or space, to which all things were possible in man and god. It was the vastness of a wise child’s mind, to which there are no boundaries between the true and magical. Yet this simplicity was so informed with wisdom that Yuan could not but love it, and ponder, troubled, on his own narrowness of understanding. One day, in such trouble, he said to Mary, when she came in and found him alone and troubled, “Almost your father persuades me to be a Christian!”

And she answered, “Does he not almost so persuade us all? But you will find, as I did, the barrier is the — almost. Our two minds are different, Yuan — less simple, less sure, more exploring.”

So she spoke, definitely and calmly, and linked thus with her Yuan felt himself pulled back from some brink towards which he had been drawn against his will, and yet somehow with his will, too, because he loved the old man. But she drew him back each time.

If this house was the outer gateway, the woman was the gateway to its inner heart. For through her he learned of many things. For him she told the story of her people and how they came to the shores of the land upon which they lived, gathered out of every nation and tribe nearly upon the earth, and how by force and by guile and by every measure of war they wrested the land from those who possessed it and took it for themselves, and Yuan listened as he had been used to listen to tales of the Three Kingdoms in his childhood. Then she told how her forefathers forced their way always to the farthest coasts, boldly and desperately, and while she talked, sometimes in the room by the fire, sometimes walking in woods when the leaves fell now before winter, Yuan seemed to feel in this woman for all her outward gentleness the inner hardness which was in her blood. Her eyes could grow brilliant and daring and cold, and her chin set beneath her straight lips, and she would kindle as she talked, very proud of the past of her race, and Yuan was half afraid of her.

And here was the strangest thing, that at these times he felt in her a power that was man, almost, and in himself a lesser, leaning quality which was less than man, as though they two together might make man and woman, but interfused, and not clearly he the man and she the woman. And there was sometimes in her eyes a look so possessive towards him, as though she felt herself stronger than he, that his flesh drew back until she changed her look. So while he often saw her beautiful, her body arrowy and light with all her energy, and while he could not but be moved by her darting mind, yet he never could feel her quite flesh to his flesh, or as a woman to be touched or loved, for there was that in her which made him a little afraid of her, and so held back growing love.

He was glad of this, for he still did not wish to think of love or woman, and while he could not keep away from this woman, since there was much in her which drew him, yet he was glad he did not want to touch her. If any had asked him even now he would have said, “It is not wise nor well for two of different flesh to wed each other. There is the outer difficulty of the two races, neither of which likes such union. But there is also the inner struggle against each other, and this pull away from each other goes as deep as blood does — there is no end to that war between two different bloods.”

Yet there were times, too, when he was shaken in his sureness that he was safe against her, for sometimes she seemed not wholly foreign to him even in blood, for she could not only show him her own people, but she showed him his people, too, in such a way as he had never seen them. There was much Yuan did not know of his own kind. He had lived among them in a way, a part of his father’s life, a part of the school of war and of young men filled with ardor for a cause, a part of that earthen house, even, and a part too of the great new city, but between these parts there was no unity to make them into one world. When any asked him of his own country or his people, he spoke out of knowledge so separated and disjointed, that even while he spoke he remembered something against what he said, and at last it came about that he did not speak at all of it except to deny such things as the tall priest had shown, for pride’s sake.

But through this western woman’s eyes, who had never even seen the earth upon which his people had their life, he saw his country as he wished to see it. Now, for his sake, he knew, she read everything she could about his people, all books and sayings of travellers, the stories and the tales which had been put into her language, and the poems, too, and she pored over pictures. From all this she formed within her mind a dream, an inner knowledge, of what Yuan’s country was, and to her it seemed a place most perfectly beautiful, where men and women lived in justice and in peace, in a society framed soundly upon the wisdom of its sages.

And Yuan, listening to her, saw it so, too. When she said, “It seems to me, Yuan, that in your country you have solved all our human problems. The beautiful relationship of father to son, of friend to friend, of man to man — everything is thought of and expressed simply and well. And the hatred that your people have for violence and war, how I admire that!” And Yuan, listening, forgot his own childhood and remembered only that it was true he did hate violence and war, and since he did, he felt his people did, and he remembered the villagers, how they had besought him against any wars, and so her words seemed true to him and only true.

And sometimes when she gazed at a picture she had found and saved for him to look at with her, a picture perhaps of a slender tall pagoda, flung up against the sky from some craggy mountain top, or perhaps a country pool fringed about with drooping willows and white geese floating in the shadows, she caught her breath to cry softly, “O Yuan — beautiful—beautiful! Why is it when I look at these pictures I seem to feel they are of a place I have lived in and know very well? There is a strange longing in me for them. I think yours must be the most lovely country in the world.”

Yuan, staring at the pictures, seeing them through her eyes, and himself remembering the beauty he had seen those few days upon the land, where he had seen such pools, accepted what she said most simply and he answered honestly enough, “It is true; it is a very fair land.”

Then she, looking at him troubled, said on, “How crude we all must seem to you, and how crude our life — we are so new and crude!” And Yuan suddenly felt that this, too, was true. He remembered the house in which he lived, the brawling woman there, often angry at her daughter, so that in many bickering ways she filled the house with anger, and he remembered the poor in the city, but he said only very kindly, “In this house, at least, I find the peace and courtesy to which I am accustomed.”

When she was in a mood like this, Yuan almost loved her. He thought proudly, “My country has this power over her, that when she thinks and dreams upon it, she grows soft and quiet, and her hardness goes away, and she is all a woman.” And he wondered if it might be one day that he would love her in spite of his own wish. Sometimes he thought it so, and then he reasoned thus, “For if she lived in my country, which she has already so much made her own, she would always be like this, gentle and womanish and admiring, and leaning on me for what she needs.”

And Yuan at such times thought it might be sweet to have it so, and it would be sweet to teach her how to speak his tongue; sweet, too, to live in the home that she could make, a home like this one he had learned to love very well, its comforts and its homeliness.

But as surely as he let himself be drawn thus, he would come one day to find this Mary changed again, her hardness flashing out, her dominating self the uppermost, so that she could argue and condemn and judge and drive a point home with a keen word or two, even to her father, for she was gentler with Yuan than with anyone, and then he was afraid of her again, and he felt a wildness in her that he could not subdue. So did she draw him to her and so thrust him from her many times.

Thus through the fifth year and the sixth did Yuan continue in this bondage to this woman, and always she was either more than woman to him so that he was afraid of her, or less than woman so that he did not desire her, and yet he never could wholly forget she was a woman. Nevertheless, at last it came about, that with his deep, too narrow nature, she was his only friend.

Thus was it more sure that soon or late he must draw closer to her still, or else grow colder towards her, and he drew away and it came about over a thing not great in itself.

Now Yuan was one who never could take part in all the fooleries of his fellows. There came to the school that last year two brothers who were of his own race, but from the southern parts, where men are light in speech and heart, and variable in mind and laugh too easily. These were two youths so debonair, who so easily lent themselves to the lesser life about them that they were well beloved and often sought for such occasions as demanded what they could do, and they had learned to sing as well as any clown the roaring songs or tricky, halting rhythms which the students loved, so that when they came before a crowd they grinned and danced like clowns and loved the clapping hands of any crowd. Between them and Yuan there was a chasm deeper than between him and the white men, and not only was it that their native language was not his, since south and north have not the same tongue, but because Yuan was secretly ashamed of them. Let these white men, he thought, shake their bodies hither and thither in foolishness but not his countrymen before these foreigners. And when Yuan heard the loud laughter and the roars of praise his own face grew still and cold, because he discerned, or was sure he did, a mockery beneath the merriment.

One day especially he could not bear it. There had been an evening set for amusement in a certain hall and thither Yuan went, inviting with him Mary Wilson, for she now would often go with him to public places, and there they sat with all the others. These two Cantonese appeared in their turn that night, tricked out as an old farmer and his wife, the farmer with a long false queue hung down his back, and the wife coarse and loud as any bawdy woman. And Yuan must sit there and see those two play the fool, in pretense quarrelling and cursing over a fowl made of cloth and feathers which they held between them and divided bit by bit, and they spoke so all could understand and yet seemed somehow to be speaking in their own tongue, too. Indeed the sight was very funny, and the two so witty and so clever that none could keep from laughing, and even Yuan smiled a little sometimes, in spite of an uneasy heart, and Mary laughed often and when the two were gone she turned to Yuan, her face still bright with laughter, “It might have been a bit straight out of your country, Yuan! I am so glad to have seen it.”

But these words drove the laughter from him. He said very stiffly, “It was not my country at all. No farmer there wears queues in these days. It was as much a farce as any comedian upon your own stage in New York.”

Seeing he was somehow very hurt, she said quickly, “Oh, of course I see that. It was only nonsense, but there was a flavor to it, nevertheless, Yuan?”

But Yuan would not answer. He sat gravely through the evening until it was over, and at the door he bowed and when she asked him to come in he would not, although of late he had looked forward eagerly to coming in and staying awhile in the warm room with her. When now he refused, she looked at him questioningly, not knowing what was wrong, yet knowing something was; suddenly she was a little impatient with him, and felt him foreign and different and difficult, and she let him go, saying only, “Another time, perhaps.” Then he went away more hurt because she had not urged him and he thought somberly, “That clownishness made her think less of me, because she saw my race so foolish.”

He went home and he was so angry in himself, thinking of her coolness, too, that he went to the house where those two clowns slept and knocked and went into their room and surprised them as they stood half dressed, preparing for sleep. Upon the table were the false queue and the long false whiskers and all the things they used for disguise, and seeing these, Yuan could not but add earnestness to what he said. He said very coldly, “I come only to say I think it wrong that you did what you did tonight. It is not true love of country so to hold one’s own up for cause of laughter to a people always too ready for such laughing at us.”

At this the two brothers were wholly taken aback, and first they stared at each other and at Yuan, and then one burst into laughter and then the other, and the elder said in the foreign tongue, since they and Yuan spoke differently in any other tongue, “We let you hold up the honor of the country, elder brother! You have dignity enough for a million others!” At this they roared again and Yuan could not bear their wide lips and little merry eyes and their squat bodies. He looked at them while they laughed and then without a word went out and shut the door behind him.

“These men of the south,” he muttered, “to us true Chinese they are no kin — petty tribes—”

Lying in his bed that night, the bare branches of the trees patterned in shadows upon the white moonlit wall, he was glad he had no dealings with them, glad he had not even in the old days stayed on in their school of war, and he felt in this foreign country very far away from these very ones whom others counted of his race and nation. He stood alone, he thought, proudly, himself the only one to show forth what his people really were.

Thus Yuan gathered all his pride to strengthen him, for he was delicate in feeling this night, because he could not bear, knowing he valued most Mary’s praise of him, to have her see his kind in any foolish light. To him it was as though she saw himself thus, and this he could not endure. He lay, therefore, very proud and solitary, more solitary because from these two even of his countrymen he felt alien, and more solitary because she had not begged him to come into her house. He thought bitterly, “She looked at me differently. She looked at me almost as though I had been myself one of those two fools.”

And then he resolved he would not care, and he fostered in himself every memory of her that was not dear, how she could be hard sometimes and her voice incisive as a blade of steel, and how sometimes she was positive as a woman should not be before men, and he remembered her at the wheel of her car, driving it as though it were a beast she owned and forced to great speed and greater, her face set as stone. All these memories he did not love, and at last he ended them by saying in his haughty heart, “I have my work to do, and I will do it well. On the day when I finish what I have to do, I swear there shall not be a name above my name in the lists. Thus is my people honored.”

And so he slept at last.

But for all his loneliness, he could not draw again into his solitude, for this Mary would not let him. She wrote him after three days again, and he could not but know his heart stirred strongly in him when he saw the square letter on his table. He felt his loneliness more heavily than he had before, and so now he took up the letter quickly, eager to know what she would say. When he tore it open he was a little cooled, because the words inside were very usual, and not as though she had not seen a friend for three days, whom she had grown used to seeing every day. There were only four lines and they said only that her mother had a certain flower in early bloom which she wished Yuan to see, and would he come the next morning? It would by tomorrow be in full bloom. … That was all.

At that moment Yuan was nearer to love for this woman than he ever had been. But her coolness pricked him, too, and he said to himself with a touch of his old childish willfulness, “Well, if she says I am to see her mother, why, then I will see her mother!” and in his little pique he planned that the next day he would devote himself to the mother.

And so he did, and when, as he stood by the flower with the lady, and gazed into its clear whiteness, Mary came by, drawing on her gloves, he only bowed his head a little without speech. But she would not have his coolness. No, although she did not stop except to say some common household thing to her mother, she threw her full look on Yuan, a look so calm and free from any meaning other than her friendship that Yuan forgot his hurt and afterwards, though she was gone, he suddenly found the flower lovely, and he took a new interest in this old mother and in what she had to say, though until this time he thought her usually too full in her speech, too quick to words of praise and of affection which she poured out, or so it seemed to Yuan, too easily on everyone alike. But now he thought in the garden she was only herself, a simple woman, very kind, and always tender to a young thing, so that she could touch a seedling struggling through the soil as tenderly as though it were a little child, and she could almost weep if a young shoot were snapped inadvertently from a rose tree, or if one stepped by accident upon a plant. She loved to feel her two hands in the earth among roots and seeds.

Here today Yuan could share her feelings, and after a while in this dewy garden he helped her pull the weeds and showed her how to move a seedling so it need not wilt but spread its small roots confidently to the new soil. He even promised he would find some seeds from his country, and would see if he could find a sort of cabbage, very green and white and well-flavored, and he was sure she would like it very well. And this slight thing made him feel more again part of this house, and now he wondered how he ever had thought this lady was too free of speech or ever anything other than warm and motherly.

Yet even today he had not much to say to this lady except the little talk of flowers or vegetables she planted. For he soon knew her mind was as simple in its own way as his own country mother’s mind, a kindly narrow mind which dwelt on a dish to be cooked or a friend’s gossip or the garden and its welfare, or on a bowl of flowers upon the dining table. Her loves were love of God and of her own two, and in these loves she lived most faithfully and so simply that Yuan was confounded sometimes by this simplicity. For he found that this lady, who could read well enough to take up any book and comprehend it, was as filled with strange beliefs as any villager in his own land. By her own talk with him he knew it, for she spoke of a certain festival in spring and she said, “We call it Easter, Yuan, and on this day our dear Lord rose from the dead again and ascended into heaven.”

But Yuan had not the heart to smile, for well he knew that there are many tales like this among folk of every nation, and he had read them in his childish days, although he could scarcely think this lady did believe them, except he heard the awe in her kind voice and saw the goodness in her truthful eyes, blue and placid as a child’s eyes, under her white hair, and he knew she did believe.

These hours in the garden finished what the quiet full look from Mary’s eyes had begun, and when she came back, Yuan had put by all his hurt, and he said nothing of it, but met her as though there had been no three days apart. She said, smiling, when they were alone, “Have you spent all these two hours with mother in her garden? She is merciless if once she gets you there!”

And Yuan felt her smile free him and he smiled back and said, “Does she believe the tales she tells of rising from the dead? We have these stories but they are not believed often, even by women if they are learned.”

To this she answered, “She does believe it, Yuan. And will you understand me when I say I would fight to keep you free from such beliefs because for you they would be false, and at the same time I would fight to keep my mother in those same beliefs because for her they are true and necessary? She would be lost without them, for by them she has lived and by them she must die. But you and I — we must have our own beliefs to live and die in!”

As for the lady, she grew that morning to like Yuan very well, so well indeed that often later she forgot his race and kind and would say in mild distress, if he spoke of his home, “Yuan, I declare I forget most of the time now that you are not an American boy. You fit in so well here.”

But to this Mary answered quickly, “He will never be quite American, mother.” And once she added in a lower voice, “And I am glad of it. I like him as he is.”

This Yuan remembered, for when Mary spoke with some secret energy, the mother for once answered nothing, but she looked with trouble in her eyes upon her daughter, and Yuan fancied at that moment she was not quite so warm as she had been towards him. But this passed when he had been with her a time or two more in her garden, for in that early spring a sort of beetle fell upon the rose trees, and Yuan helped her zealously and forgot her little chill towards him. But even in so small a thing as killing beetles Yuan felt a confusion in himself; he furiously hated the cruel tiny things, destroying beauty of bud and leaf with every hour they lived, and he wanted to crush them every one. And yet his fingers loathed the task of plucking them from the trees and his flesh was squeamish afterwards, nor could he wash his hands enough. But the lady had no such feelings. She was only glad for every one she plucked away, and killed them gladly for the plague they were.

So did Yuan come to friendliness with the lady, and he drew near, too, to his old teacher, as near as he could. But the truth was that none drew very near to this old man, who was so strange a compound of depth and simplicity, of faith and intelligence. Yuan could and did talk often with him of his books and of the thoughts there, but often even in the midst of learned talk of some scientific law, the old man’s thoughts would steal away into a farther nebulous world, where Yuan could not follow him and he would muse aloud, “Perhaps, Yuan, such laws as this are only keys to unlock a door to a closed garden, and we must throw the key recklessly away and go forth into that garden boldly by imagination — or call it faith, Yuan — and the garden is the garden of God — God infinite, unchangeable, in whose very being are wisdom, justice, goodness, and truth — all those ideals to which our poor human laws try to lead us.”

So he mused, until Yuan, listening and comprehending nothing, one day said, “Sir, leave me at the gate. I cannot throw away the key.”

To which the old man smiled a little sadly and answered, “You are just like Mary. You young people — you are like young birds — afraid to try your wings and fly out of the little world you know. Ah, until you cease to cling to reason only and begin to trust to dreams and imaginations there will come forth no great scientists from among you. No great poets — no great scientists — the same age produces both.”

But Yuan out of all these words remembered most the one saying, “You are just like Mary.”

It was true he was like Mary. Between these two, born ten thousand miles apart, and of two bloods never mingled, there was a likeness, and it was twofold, the likeness of youth to any youth in any age, alike in their rebellions, and the other likeness, which is that between a man and maid in spite of time or blood.

For now as the full spring drew near and the trees grew green again and in the woods near the house little flowers sprang out from under the dead winter leaves, Yuan felt in himself a new freedom of the blood. Here surely in this home there was nothing to make his flesh shrink back. Here he forgot he was an alien. He could look at these three and forget their difference, so that the blue eyes of the old pair were natural to him and Mary’s eyes were lovely for their changefulness and no longer strange.

And she grew more lovely to him. Some mildness came upon her always now. She was never sharp, her voice even not incisive as it used to be. Her face grew a little fuller, her cheeks less pale, and her lips were softer and not so tightly pressed together and she moved more languidly and with some ease she had not before.

Sometimes on Yuan’s coming she seemed very busy, and she came and went so that he seldom saw her. But as spring came full in this she changed, and, not knowing that they did it, each began to plan to meet every morning in the garden. There she came to him, fresh as the day was, her dark hair smooth about her ears. To Yuan she was most lovely when she was dressed in blue, so one day he said, smiling at her, “It is the blue the country people wear in my land. It suits you.” And she smiled back and answered, “I am glad.”

One day Yuan remembered, for he came early to take his morning meal with them, and while he waited in the garden for her he bent over a bed of small pansy seedlings to take the weeds carefully from their roots. Then she came and stood there watching him, her face strangely warm and lighted, and as he looked, she put forth her hand and took from his hair a leaf or bit of weed lodged there, and he felt her quick hand touch his cheek as it dropped. He knew she did not touch him purposely, for she was always careful against such touching, so that she seemed to draw away even from an aid given her at some roughness in the road. She did not, as many maids will do, put forth a hand to touch a man for any small cause. It was in truth the first time he had ever felt her hand, except in the cool casual touch of greeting.

But now she did not excuse herself. By her frank eyes and by the sudden faint red in her cheeks he knew she felt the touch and that she knew he did. They looked at each other quickly, and turned away again, and she said tranquilly, “Shall we go in for breakfast?”

And he answered as tranquilly, “I must just wash my hands.”

So the moment passed.

Afterwards he thought a little of it and his mind flew to bring him the memory of that other touch so long ago, given by the maid now dead. Strangely, beside that ardent open touch, this new light touch seemed less than nothing and still the other burned more real. He muttered to himself, “Doubtless she did not know she did it. I am a fool.” And he resolved to forget it all, and to control his mind more sternly against such thoughts, for he truly did not welcome them.

So through the months of that last spring Yuan lived in a strange double way. Within himself he held a certain place of his own, secure against this woman. The softness of the new season, the mildness of a moonlight night when he and she might walk together down the street under the budding new-leaved trees into lonely roads leading to the country, or the stillness of a room where sometimes they sat alone while the musical steady rains of spring beat upon the window panes, even such hours alone with her could not break through into that place. And Yuan wondered at himself, not knowing how he could be so stirred as he sometimes knew he was and yet not want to yield.

For in some ways this white woman could stir him and yet hold him off, and by the same things he loved and did not love. Because he loved beauty and never could escape it, he often saw her beautiful, her brow and neck so white against her dark hair. And yet he did not love such whiteness. He often saw her lighted eyes, clear and grey underneath her dark brows, and he could admire the mind which made them shine and flash, and yet he did not love grey eyes. So, too, with her hands, quick, vivid, speaking, moving hands, beautiful and angular in strength. But he did not love such hands somehow.

Yet was he drawn to her again and yet again by some power in her, so that over and over in that busy spring he would pause in the midst of his work in fields or in his room or in the hall of books, to find her suddenly in his mind. He came to ask himself at such times, “Shall I miss her when I go away? Am I bound somehow to this country through this woman?” He dallied with the thought that he might stay on and study more, and yet he could ask himself plainly, “Why do I really stay? If in truth for this woman, to what end, seeing I do not want to wed one of her race?” Yet he felt a pang when he thought further, “No, I will go home.” Then he thought further that perhaps he would never see her again, once he was gone, for how could he return again? When he thought he might never see her again, then it seemed he must indeed put off his going.

So might the questioning have dragged itself into an answer and he stayed on, except there came across the sea news which was like his country’s voice demanding him.

Now these years while Yuan had been away he had scarcely known how his country did. He knew that there were little wars, but to these he paid no heed, for there had been always little wars.

In these six years Wang the Tiger wrote him of one or two such petty wars he undertook; one against a little new bandit chieftain, and a second time against a lord of war who passed unbidden through his regions. But Yuan passed quickly over such news, partly because he never loved wars, and partly because such things seemed not real at all to him, living in this peaceful foreign country, so that when some fellow pupil called out blithely, “Say, Wang, what’s this new war you’re getting up in China? I see it in the papers. Some Chang or Tang or Wang—” And Yuan, ashamed, would answer quickly, “It is nothing — no more than any robbery anywhere.”

Sometimes his lady mother, who wrote him faithfully once a season, said in her letters, “The revolution grows apace, but I do not know how. Now that Meng is gone we nave no revolutionists in our family. I only hear that at last from the south the new revolution breaks. But Meng cannot yet come home. He is there among them, for he has written so, but he dares not yet come home, even if he would, for the rulers here are afraid and still very bitter in their hunting of those like him.”

But Yuan did not lay aside wholly the thought of his own country and as he could he followed all the news he could find of that revolution, and he seized eagerly on every little printed line which told of some change, such as, “The old calendar of the moon is changed to the new western calendar,” or he read, “It is forbidden any more to bind the feet of women,” or he read, “The new laws will not let a man have more wives than one,” and many such things he read in those days. Every change Yuan read with joy and believed, and through all he could see his whole country changing, so that he thought to himself and wrote to Sheng so also, “When we go back next summer we will not know our land. It seems not possible that so soon, in six short years, so great a change has been brought about.”

To which Sheng wrote back after many days, “Do you go home this summer? But I am not ready. I have a year or two yet I want to live here, if my father will send the money for it.”

At these words Yuan could not but remember with great discomfort that woman who put Sheng’s little poems to such languid heavy music, and then he would not think of her. But he wished Sheng would hasten and go home. It was true he had not yet won his degree, although he had spent more time at it than he should, and then troubled, Yuan thought how Sheng never spoke of the new things in their own country. But he excused Sheng quickly, because indeed it was not easy in this rich peaceful land to think of revolutions and of battles for a cause, and Yuan did too forget these things often in his own days of peace.

And yet, as he knew afterwards, the revolution was even then coming to its height. Surely in its old way, up from the south, while Yuan spent his days upon his books, while he questioned himself what he felt for this white woman whom he loved and did not love, the grey army of the revolution, in which Meng was, crossed through the heart of his country to the great river. There it battled, but Yuan, ten thousand miles away, lived in peace.

In such great peace he might thus have lived forever. For suddenly one day the warmth between him and the woman deepened. So long they had stood where they were, a little more than friends, a little less than lovers, that Yuan had come to take it as a thing accepted that every evening for a while they walked and talked together after the old pair slept. Before these two they showed nothing. And Mary would have said very honestly to any question, “But there is nothing to tell. What is there between us except friendship?” And it was true there had never been a speech between them which others could not hear and wonder nothing at it.

Yet every night these two felt the day not ended unless they had been alone a little while together, even though each talked idly only of the day’s happenings. But in this little hour they grew more to know each other’s minds and hearts than by days of other hours.

One night in that spring, they walked thus together up and down between the rose trees planted by a certain winding path. At the end of this path there was a clump of trees, six elm trees once planted in a circle and now grown large and old and full of shadows. Within these shadows the old man had placed a wooden seat, because he loved to come and sit there for meditation. On this night the shadows were very black, because it was a night of clear moon and all the garden was full of light except where the six elms grew. Once did the two pause within the circle of shadow and the woman said half carelessly, “See how dark these shadows are — we seem lost once we step within them.”

In silence they stood and Yuan saw with a strange, uneasy pleasure how clear the moonlight was and he said, “The moonlight is so bright one can almost see the color of the new leaves.”

“Or almost feel the shadow cold and the moonlight warm,” said Mary, stepping out again into the light.

Yet again they paused when they had walked to and fro, and this time Yuan paused first and he said, “Are you cold, Mary?” For now he spoke her name easily.

She answered, “No—” half stammering, and then, without knowing how it came about, they stood uncertain in the shadow and then quickly she moved to him, touched his hands, and Yuan felt this woman in his arms, and his arms about her, too, his cheek against her hair. And he felt her trembling and knew he was trembling and then as one they sank upon the bench, and she lifted up her head and looked at him and put up her two hands and held his head, her hands upon his cheeks, and she whispered, “Kiss me!”

Then Yuan, who had seen such things pictured in amusement houses but never had he done it, felt his head drawn down and her lips hot against his lips, and she was pressed and centered on his lips.

In that instant he drew back. Why he must draw back he could not tell, for there was that in him, too, which wanted to press on and on, deeper and long. But stronger than that desire was a distaste he could not understand, except it was the distaste of flesh for flesh that was not its own kind. He drew back, and stood up quickly, hot and cold and shamed and confused together. But the woman sat on, amazed. Even in the shadow he could see her white face upturned to him, amazed, questioning him why he drew back. But for his very life he could say nothing, nothing! He only knew he must draw back. At last he said half above his breath, and not in his usual voice, “It is cold — you must go in to the house — I must go back.”

Still she did not move, and then after a little time she said, “You go if you must. I want to stay here awhile—”

And he, feeling himself somehow lacking in what he should have been, yet knowing he had done only what he must do, said in attempted courtesy, “You must come in. You will be chilled.”

She answered deliberately without moving at all, “I am chilled already. What does it matter?”

And Yuan, hearing how cold and dead her voice, turned quickly and left her there and went away.

But hour after hour he could not sleep. He thought of her only, and wondered if she still sat there in those shadows alone and he was troubled for her and yet he knew he had done only what he must. Like any child he muttered to excuse himself, “I did not like it. I truly did not like it.”

How it might have been between them after that Yuan did not know. For as though she knew his plight his country now called him home.

The next morning he awoke, knowing he must go to see Mary, and yet he delayed, half fearful, for now in the morning still there were these truths clear to him, that he had somehow failed her, though he knew he could have done no other thing than what he did.

But when at last he went to the house he found the three of them in great gravity and consternation over what they saw in a paper. The old man asked anxiously as Yuan came in with him, “Yuan, can this be true?”

Yuan looked with them at the paper and there in great letters were the words that the new revolutionists had fallen upon the white men and women in a certain city in his land and had driven them from their homes and even killed some among them, a priest or two, an old teacher and a physician, and some others. Yuan’s heart stopped, and he cried out, “There is a mistake here—”

And the old lady murmured, for she had sat waiting for his word, “Oh, Yuan, I knew it must be wrong!”

But Mary said nothing. Though Yuan did not look at her when he came in, and not now, either, yet he saw her sitting there, silent, her chin resting on her crossed hands, looking at him. But he would not look at her fully. He read quickly down the page, crying over and over, “It is not true — it cannot be true — such a thing could never happen in my country! Or if it did there is some dreadful cause—”

His eye searched for that cause. Then Mary spoke. She said, and now he knew her well enough to perceive her heart from the very way she spoke, her words clipped and clear and seemingly careless, her voice a little hard and casual, “I looked for the cause, too, Yuan. But there is none — it seems they were all quite innocent and friendly people, surprised in their homes and with their children—”

At this Yuan looked at her, and she looked at him, her eyes as clear and grey and cold as ice. And they accused him and he cried out to her silently, “I only did what I could not help!” But they steadily accused him.

Then Yuan, trying to be his usual self, sat down and talking more than was his wont, said eagerly, “I shall call up my cousin Sheng — he will know, being in that large city, what the truth is. I know my people — they could not do a thing like this — we are a civilized race — not savage — we love peace — we hate bloodshed. There is a mistake here, I know.”

And the old lady repeated fervently, “I know there is a mistake, Yuan. I know God could not let such a thing happen to our good missionaries.”

But suddenly Yuan felt his breath stopped by this simple speech, and he was about to cry out, “If they were those priests—” and then his eyes fell on Mary again, and he was silent. For now she was looking at him still and it was with a great speechless sadness, and he could not say a word. His heart longed for forgiveness from her. Yet his very heart drew back, lest in seeking forgiveness it yield to that to which his flesh did not wish to yield.

He said no more, and none spoke except the old man, who, when he was finished, said to Yuan as he rose, “Will you tell me, Yuan, what news you learn?” Then Yuan rose, too, suddenly not wanting to be left alone with Mary, lest the lady leave them so, and he went away very heavy of heart, afraid because he did not want the news to be true. He could not bear to be put to such shame, and this the more because he felt the woman judged him secretly for his withdrawal and counted it for weakness in him. Therefore the more must he show his people blameless of this thing.

Never again were these two near to each other. For as day passed into day, Yuan was swept into this passion to show his country clear, and he came to feel that if he could do it, he would be justified himself. In all the busy ending weeks of that year of school he so busied himself. Step by step he must prove it not his country’s fault. It was true, Sheng said, his voice coming calm and like itself across the wires that first day, it was true the thing was done. And Yuan cried back impatiently, “But why — but why?” And Sheng’s voice came back so careless Yuan could almost see him shrug himself, “Who knows? A mob — communists — some fanatic cause — who can know the truth?”

But Yuan was in an agony. “I will not believe it — there was a cause — some aggression—something!”

And Sheng said quietly, “We can never know the truth—” and changing he asked, “When shall we meet again, Yuan? I have not seen you in too long — when do you go home?”

But Yuan was able only to say “Soon!” He knew that he must go home; if he could not clear his country, then he must go home as quickly as he could finish what remained to be done.

Thereafter he went no more into the garden, nor were there hours alone with Mary any more. They were friendly outwardly, but there was nothing to be said between them, and Yuan planned so he need not meet her. For more and more as he could not prove his country blameless, he turned somehow against these very friends of his.

The old pair perceived this and though they were still gentle with him always, yet they drew themselves a little apart, too, not blaming him at all, and sensitive to his distress, though not understanding it.

But Yuan felt they blamed him. Upon his shoulders he carried the weight of all his country did. Now as he daily read the papers and read of things that any army does in victory and marching through a vanquished country, he felt himself in agony. Sometimes he wondered about his father, for the army moved steadily towards the northern plains, everywhere victorious.

But his father seemed very far away. Near, too near, were these gentle silent aliens, to whose home he must sometimes still go, for they would have it so, who never spoke one word of what the papers said, sparing him all mention of what they knew must torture him with shame. And yet in spite of all their silence, they accused. Their very silence accused. The woman’s gravity and coolness, the prayers of the old two, for sometimes before a meal to which they pressed him the old man would say low and troubled words and he would add to his thanks such words as these, “Save them, O God, who are Thy servants in a distant land, who live in such peril of their lives.” And the lady would add to it most earnestly her soft “Amen.”

Yuan could not bear this prayer, nor this amen, and he could bear it less because even Mary, who had warned him against the faith of the old pair, now bowed her head in new respect of them, not, he knew, that she believed more than she did, but only because she felt the dangers against which they prayed. So was she leagued with them against him, or so he thought.

Again Yuan was alone, and alone he worked to the year’s finish and to the hour when with the others he stood for his degree. Alone among them all, the single one of his own people, he received the symbol of his scholarship. Alone he heard his name mentioned for high honors. There were a few who came to give him congratulations, but Yuan told himself he did not care if they came or not.

Alone he packed his books and clothes. At the last it came into his mind that the old pair were even glad to see him go, although their kindness did not change, and then Yuan in his pride thought to himself, “I wonder if they have been uneasy lest I wed their daughter, and so are glad to see me go!”

He smiled bitterly and believed this so. And then thinking of her he thought to himself again, “But I have this to thank her for — she saved me from turning a Christian. Yes, once she saved me — but once, too, I saved myself!”