Kinfolk

1

THE THEATER IN CHINATOWN was crowded to the doors. Every night actors brought from Canton played and sang the old Chinese operas. If Billy Pan, the manager, announced a deficit at the end of the lunar year, businessmen contributed money to cover it. The theater was a bulwark of home for them. Their children went to American schools, spoke the American language, acted like American children. The fathers and mothers were not highly educated people and they could not express to the children what China was, except that it was their own country, which must not be forgotten. But in the theater the children could see for themselves what China was. Here history was played again and ancient heroes came to life before their eyes. It was the only place in Chinatown which could compete with the movies. Parents brought their children early and stayed late. They talked with friends and neighbors, exchanged sweetmeats and gossip, and sat spellbound and dreaming when the curtain went up to show the figures who were contemporary with their ancestors.

The play tonight was Mu Lan, the heroine of a thousand years ago, who took her father’s place when he fell in battle and so saved her nation from invaders. This was a favorite play, and although it was in the repertory of every company, the citizens of Chinatown never tired of it. It was nearly midnight and they waited with excitement for the curtain to rise on the fifth act. At this moment Billy Pan came to the door and looked over the crowd. He was a stout middle-aged man, dressed in a gray cloth suit, and he was as usual smoking a cigar. His round red face was cheerful and his small eyes twinkled with satisfaction as he glanced about the house. Good business—Mu Lan always brought him good business. His shrewd eyes examined the crowd more closely, searching for possible celebrities. It pleased the crowd if he could produce a celebrity after the show. He knew everybody in Chinatown and his eyes slid rapidly from one face to another.

In the tenth row in the middle seat his eyes halted. Dr. Liang Wen Hua! He had seen Dr. Liang only once and then from a platform in uptown New York, when during the war delegates from Chinatown had been invited to come to a celebration of Double Ten. Dr. Liang had made the chief address, and all the delegates had taken pride in the tall handsome figure who was also Chinese. But Dr. Liang had never accepted an invitation to Chinatown. He made the excuse that he could not speak Cantonese, since his native region in China was in the north, near Peking. Yet here he was tonight sitting among the crowd!

The curtain rose and through the darkness Billy Pan edged his way up the narrow aisle. At the tenth row he paused, whispered and waited. The man in the seat next to Dr. Liang came out obediently, and Billy Pan pushed into his place.

“Dr. Liang?” he whispered respectfully.

Dr. Liang turned his head.

“Excuse me, this is Billy Pan, proprietor of theater,” Billy Pan whispered in English. “I saw you. Great honor, I am sure! Our theater is very poor. I am sorry you did not tell me you are coming and I would have better show for you, anyway best seat.”

Dr. Liang inclined his head. “I am very comfortable, thank you,” he said in his low rich voice. “And this is the play I wished to see.”

“You not come before, I think?”

“As a professor, I am kept busy.”

“You like this play?” Billy Pan persisted.

“I am planning a summer course on the Chinese drama,” Dr. Liang replied. “I came to see whether my students might understand this play, as presented by Chinese actors.”

“It is too poor,” Billy Pan exclaimed.

Dr. Liang smiled. “I suppose American students will not be critical.”

Behind them and beside them people were craning their heads. Everybody knew Billy Pan and knew that he would not trouble himself about any ordinary person. Someone recognized Dr. Liang and the name ran along the crowded benches.

“Please,” Billy Pan begged. “I ask a great favor of you.”

Dr. Liang smiled. “Yes?”

“After the play, will you speak a few words to us from the stage?”

Dr. Liang hesitated.

“Please! It will honor us.”

Dr. Liang was gracious. “Very well — but you will have to translate for me. My Chinese is not Cantonese, you know.”

“Honored!” Billy Pan exclaimed with fervor.

He rose, sweating and excited, and pushed his way out again and the man whom he had displaced crept back. Now that this man knew by whom he was sitting he felt awkward and humble and he sat as far as possible from the great man.

Dr. Liang did not notice him. His mind was on the gaudy scene upon the stage. In his secret heart he did not enjoy the stylized traditional performance. He had been too long in New York, too often he had gone to Broadway and Radio City. There was something childish about the strutting declaiming actors and the brightly ancient costumes. This sort of thing might be all very well for a country audience before a temple, but certainly it did not suit a modern people. Would he be ashamed if he brought his classes here, or might he explain the drama in terms of the picturesque? He could always tell them that in Shanghai as well as in Peking there was a drama as modern as in New York.

Then it occurred to him that not only the play was difficult. The audience was even more so. Children pattered back and forth and women talked whenever the action dulled for a moment on the stage. Men got up and went out and came back, pausing to greet their friends on the way. It was most unfortunate, he thought, his handsome lips set and his head high, that Chinese like himself were not the sole representatives of his country. It was a great pity that Chinatown had ever been allowed.

The clamor of drums and flutes and violins burst forth in concerted cacophony and the crowd was suddenly silent. The star was coming on. A curtain was drawn back and a brilliant figure dashed upon the stage. It was Mu Lan herself, in the ancient garb of a warrior, and shouts burst from the people. She stalked up and down the stage brandishing the little whip which meant she was on horseback, singing in a high falsetto as she went. From the timbre of the voice Dr. Liang knew that Mu Lan was being played by a young man. The audience, knowing it also, were yet naïvely ready to imagine that she was a beautiful strong young woman.

“I might explain the motif by saying that Mu Lan is the Chinese version of Joan of Arc,” Dr. Liang thought.

He was pleased with the idea and his mind played about it. Before he knew it the curtain went down, the hard neon lights flashed on, and Billy Pan stood on the stage waving his arms for attention. Everyone obeyed. People who had been getting up sat down again, and babies began to wail and were hushed. A flood of rapid explosive Cantonese burst from Billy Pan, none of which Dr. Liang could understand. When everyone turned to stare at him, however, he knew that he was being introduced and he rose. The people in the row with him stepped into the aisle to allow him to pass, and he thanked them gravely and walked with dignity up the aisle to the stage and mounted four rickety steps. Billy Pan was waiting for him with a look of devotion, and Dr. Liang smiled slightly. He stood with his hands clasped and he bowed to the audience. Then he began to speak, waiting at the end of each long sentence for Billy Pan to translate.

It was one of his less important speeches, pleasant, courteous, mildly humorous, but the audience was easy to please and laughed heartily and quickly. He was warmed by their pride in him and he took the opportunity to remark that it was the duty of every Chinese to represent his country in the most favorable light to Americans who were, after all, only foreigners. As for himself, he said, he was careful always to behave as though he were, in his own small way, of course, an ambassador. He closed with a reference to Confucius, and was astonished that this did not seem to please the people. They were ignorant, he supposed — very provincial, certainly. He saw them whole, a mass of rather grimy people, small tradesmen and their wives and children, alien and yet somehow building a small commonplace version of China here. Very unfortunate!

He bowed again, smiled, and walked down the steps. Billy Pan followed, and pushing aside the people, he led Dr. Liang out to the street and bawled to a passing taxicab, which swerved and stopped. He opened the door and bowed deeply.

“Thank you, a hundred thanks,” he said with fervor. “Come again! Please let me know next time and have dinner with me. There is a good restaurant in next street. I tell him plenty of time to make some good Chinese food, eh? Please! Thank you — thank you—”

He was still bowing when Dr. Liang shut the door firmly and turned to the cab driver.

“Riverside Drive,” he said distinctly.

From the darkness of the cab he looked out at Chinatown. The people were going home from the theater, shuffling along the streets. They were waking, he supposed, from the dream world of the past into the dreariness of the present. Yet they did not look dreary. Stopped by a traffic light, he heard their voices laughing and gay, and he saw fathers tenderly carrying little children while mothers led the toddlers. When did they sleep? Shops that were also homes were still lighted and viciously bright neon lamps shone down on windows of chinaware and groceries and lit up long signboards which declared the names of small firms that sold bamboo shoots and dried shrimps and curios. Young men lounged upon the counters and young girls in two’s and three’s chattered along the sidewalk. It was a lively place, and because it was crude and cheap it was almost worse, Dr. Liang thought, than Americans liked to believe it was, a place of mystery and evil. There was no mystery here, and very little evil. Families lived together closely, and parents struggled with their children to keep to the standards of a country the young had never seen. It was an ordinary place and the people were simple and common. He did not often come here because he found it depressing.

He wished with some annoyance that he had not come tonight, or at least that he had not been recognized. It was gratifying to be known, and yet it made him remember what he habitually tried to forget, that the common people of his country were not in the least like himself.

“Surely you are not a typical Chinese—” how often Americans had cried the words at him!

He always answered them with mild amusement. “I assure you I am a very ordinary Chinese. There are millions like me and better.”

He suddenly thought of his eldest son, James, and he sighed. He was profoundly proud of that brilliant boy, the child who had so easily stood at the head of his classes in school and was now at the head of the list of graduates in the medical college.

“A great mind, Dr. Liang,” the Chancellor had said only a few days ago. “A great mind and skillful hands — what a surgeon he will make!”

And now James wanted to waste all his education and go back to China! Who in a war-ruined country could pay the fees of a surgeon?

The cab slowed. “Whereabouts Riverside Drive?” the driver asked.

“Two blocks, and then one to the right, please,” Dr. Liang replied.

The streets were quiet with midnight. There was a moon and it shone down on the river. Just ahead was the George Washington Bridge, silvered with light. It was a scene familiar through twenty years of living, but Dr. Liang always felt its beauty. There was nothing more beautiful in the world, perhaps, unless it was the great marble bridge near Peking. But he did not want to be in Peking.

“Here you are,” the cabby said.

Dr. Liang stood on the sidewalk and counted his change. The man would expect an exorbitant fee — all American working people expected to earn more than any workingman was worth. He counted out the exact amount and added five per cent to it. His daughter Mary had once been angry with him for that five per cent. “Why don’t you ride on the subway?” she had demanded. He had not answered her.

He turned abruptly and entered the apartment house where he lived and stepped into an elevator without speaking. He was very tired and he felt confused and old. His son James was very confusing. The elevator mounted rapidly to the tenth floor and he stepped out. The door to his apartment opened and his wife stood there.

“I have been expecting you for an hour,” she said.

He followed her in and she shut the door and yawned loudly. He could see by the slightly dazed look on her plump face that she had been asleep on the couch and her Chinese robe of dark blue silk was wrinkled. He was often ashamed of her, but Americans liked her heartiness and good nature and Chinese feared her temper and her domineering ways. She was an excellent housekeeper, she made him entirely comfortable, and she did not interfere with certain pleasant dreams he had of quite different women whom he met in the pages of Chinese poetry. He was too good a man to allow them to come to life otherwise. He had made Confucian ethics his own and he respected his wife as the mother of his children and the heart of his household. Moreover, she worshiped him, in spite of often scolding him and occasionally flouting him. The problem of her life centered in how to indulge her children and at the same time seem to obey her husband.

“Are the children asleep?” he asked.

“An hour ago,” she said, trying to be brisk. “Sit down and rest yourself. I have kept some soup hot.”

“My sons might have waited for me,” he said in a hurt voice.

“Well, they did not,” she said in her practical way. “Now drink your soup and let us get to bed ourselves.”

She went into the kitchen and brought out a bowl of soup and a spoon on a tray and a plate of crackers. He crumbled the crackers into the soup and began to eat. “I would have been back earlier except that I was recognized and the crowd would have me address them,” he said slowly without looking at her.

“Yes, well—” she said without interest and yawned again.

A crude woman, he thought with distaste, and he did not speak for a while as he ate.

Mrs. Liang sat on a stool and watched him, her eyes bleary with sleep. She perceived simply that he was not pleased with her and she tried to make amends. “It was good of you to speak to those small people,” she said. “And I am glad you were not at home. That James of ours did nothing but talk about going back to China.” She sighed and scratched her head with her little fingernail. “You must get a good night’s sleep — he is going to talk with you in the morning.”

“I shall put him off,” Dr. Liang declared. But his appetite failed him and he set the bowl on the table only half empty. He knew that James was not a son to be put off even by his own father. Then he caught sight of Mrs. Liang’s mouth wide open in another yawn and he was suddenly angry.

“Come — come,” he cried, “get yourself to bed — spare me the sight of you!”

He stalked out of the room and turned out the light at the door. In the darkness she pattered after him humbly, and forgave him. He was a great man, and he was her husband.

Dr. Liang prided himself on his calm. Reared upon Confucian ethics in his early home in China, he had for many years comforted himself for his somewhat arid life in New York by teaching Chinese philosophy in colleges. There, he hoped, crude young Americans might imbibe from him the spiritual nourishment which he liked to think had kept China intact for four thousand years and would, he said confidently in his classroom, weather her through her present difficulties.

He summoned all his calm the next morning, as he faced his son James. The young man, twenty-six years old and last month graduated from a medical college, also faced his father. For months, all during his last year of internship in the medical center, he had been approaching inevitably this hour. He loved and feared his father, and it had taken all his strength to decide that the day had come to tell him finally that he wanted to go back to China. Why it should be this June morning rather than any other, he did not know. He had got up early, full of energy and impatience, to find that the day was clear, that the heat of the past week had broken, and that he felt hungry and well. The duplex apartment in which his family had lived almost as long as he could remember was very pleasant indeed this morning. His father had almost decided last week to put in air conditioning, in order that he could work more comfortably, which always meant more profitably. This morning being cool, he knew he would find his father in the library at his desk, and there he had gone after a hearty breakfast of fruit, bacon and eggs, coffee, and toast. The family always ate American breakfasts, and unless his mother felt inclined to cook, they ate American food altogether. His two sisters could not cook, and his younger brother Peter did not like Chinese food. All the children except himself and Mary had been born in America and were therefore American citizens.

As he listened to his son, Dr. Liang sat quietly in the large brown leather chair where he had written so many of his scholarly works. He was a tall man, for his origins were in the north, that birthplace of so many of China’s great men. His sons were tall, too, and he took pleasure in hearing Americans exclaim, “But I thought Chinese were always short!” This cry gave him the opportunity to explain in his deep and gentle voice how unfortunate it was for his people that so many of the Chinese in America were tradesmen from one small region in the province of Kwangtung. They were not at all typical, he went on to say, for their short stature and their dark color were the result of their blood mixture with tribesmen in the hills nearby. The real Chinese, he explained, were tall, as in the north, or fairly tall, as in Central China, and their skin was not dark. He himself had a pallor that was certainly lighter than many Americans owned. He was not fond of exercise and never allowed himself to get sunburned. His sons burned as red brown as any American, for they were good at sports and played tennis brilliantly. He did not encourage his daughters to enlarge their muscles by such activities. Louise, the younger one, disobeyed him frequently, but he liked to think that Mary, the elder, just younger than James, was a true Chinese daughter, obedient and mild and very pretty.

He contemplated his son from behind his spectacles. The lenses were so thick that they magnified his eyes slightly and added force to his gaze.

“It seems unwise to return home at this time,” he said. “The country is in great confusion. The Communists are threatening, and as my son your life can scarcely be safe. I would of course commend you to my friends in the government, but they could not guarantee your safety from rebellious students who might revenge themselves on me by killing you.”

“I do not want to be under the protection of anyone,” James said. “I shall just go.” He sat on the sill of the long double window, and gazing toward the river as he spoke, he could see the bridge glittering in the sunlight. It looked at once delicate and strong, a silver cobweb of steel against a misty blue sky.

“But where?” Dr. Liang asked sharply. “Where can you go in China today and not waste yourself?”

James did not answer. He sat motionless, and Dr. Liang saw more strongly than ever the son’s resemblance to his mother. Mrs. Liang was a good wife and an exemplary mother. She managed the household well, in spite of imperfect English which she would not improve, but she was stubborn.

“Your education has cost me a great deal of money,” Dr. Liang went on. “Fortunately my books on Chinese philosophy have sold well. But suppose they had not?”

James smiled. “I cannot imagine it, Father.”

Dr. Liang examined his son’s square but very handsome young face. Was this remark made with some jocular meaning? He did not understand American humor, which seemed to saturate his children. But the smile on his son’s lips was kindly.

“There is no hospital in China which is up to the standard to which you have been trained,” he observed.

“It has been twenty years since you lived there, Father.”

“You know very well that I was there ten years ago.”

“Only for six months, and you traveled constantly,” his son murmured.

“And in all my travels I saw nothing but the most primitive ways of life,” Dr. Liang retorted. “The civilization which was kept alive by the great old families such as ours is dying out. When I saw our ancestral halls I wept. My old uncle Tao lives there as a beggar — or very nearly.”

“I want to see for myself,” James said.

“How do you propose to make your living?” Dr. Liang asked almost harshly. His large beautifully shaped hands, as smooth as a woman’s, he kept habitually relaxed in order that there might be no tension in him. The cult of the hands, he often said, was a profound one. Now involuntarily he clenched his hands.

“You need not send me anything, Father,” James said.

“Of course I must! I won’t have my son going about like a beggar.”

“Do you mean I may go?”

“I do not,” Dr. Liang exclaimed. “On the contrary, I forbid it.”

James stood up. He turned from the window and faced his father. “Please don’t say that. I don’t want to have to go without your consent.”

The moment which both had dreaded for so many years had suddenly come — the moment of open rebellion. Dr. Liang had waked often in the night and dreaded it. He was proud of his elder son, and he told himself and his wife many times that James alone had justified his decision to live abroad. Had they stayed among the wars and confusions of modern China, the boy’s brilliant mind, his extraordinary talents, could never have been developed.

There were many other proofs of his wisdom. His children were all well educated; they had this comfortable and even luxurious home. They were healthy and full of energy and able to look after themselves. As for himself, Dr. Liang always said, he felt that Heaven had directed his steps, and that he had been useful in explaining to Americans the real China, the great civilization which today was obscured but which would assuredly shine forth again when peace was established in the world. It was no small mission to bring the East and West together. When times were better again he hoped, he told his American friends, to return to his own country to spend his old age, and there he would expound to his countrymen the glories of the American civilization.

“If you disobey me,” Dr. Liang now said, his hands still clenched on his knees, “then I will disown you.”

“I shall still be a Liang,” James said. “You begot me and you cannot deny that.”

Father and son glared at each other without a sign of yielding. “If I cannot deny it, I will forget it,” Dr. Liang said loudly.

Outside the door they heard footsteps retreating softly. Dr. Liang rose and strode across the room and threw open the door. No one was there. The spacious rooms were silent. He closed the door again. It was perhaps only the Irish maid Nellie who came every day to clean and to cook. But he had scarcely seated himself again when the door opened impetuously and Mrs. Liang stood there, this morning encased in a long gown of dull purple satin. In spite of her many years here she looked as Chinese as the day she had left her father’s house thirty years ago to marry a young student whom she had scarcely seen. Her hair was smoothed back into a neat bun, and her full rosy face was kind but strong-tempered.

“Now what is going on here?” she demanded in the loud voice which her husband detested. Long ago he had learned that the best way to reprove her was by making his own voice especially gentle.

“Our son asks me to allow him to return to our old home.” He spoke always in Chinese to his wife, as a reminder that he did not consider her English good enough. His own was pure, with an Oxford accent. He had visited Oxford once for a year’s lectures.

“Let him go then,” Mrs. Liang exclaimed. She came in and sat down on a large square stool, and her satin gown wrinkled over her breasts and her belly. Dr. Liang looked away.

“You do not understand, mother of my sons.” He always called her “mother of my sons” when he wanted to be very Confucian. “His life would not be safe. I have reproved our Communists so openly here that they will try to kill him if he goes to China.”

She sighed loudly at this and plucked from the knot of her hair a gold pin with which she scratched her inner ear. “I told you to stick to Confucius,” she complained. “Why should you talk about Communists? No one in America wants to hear about them.”

Dr. Liang closed his eyes at this stupidity and at the sight of the hairpin. At one end of it was the earpick and at the other a toothpick. He had besought her to throw this primitive implement away but she had refused. “How then would I pick my teeth and clean my ears?” she had demanded.

“American women do not use these instruments,” he had said.

She had stared at him. “How do you know?” she had asked shrewdly.

“Not in public, I mean,” he had said hastily.

They had compromised after ten years of argument upon her not using the pin publicly. That is, she did not use it before Americans. Chinese she did not consider the public. She used the earpick now, first on her right ear and then on her left, a busy look on her face. This helped her to think, she often declared.

“I cannot allow you to be killed, my son,” she now said to James. “If your father is sure there is danger, then you had better stay here for a year or two longer. That is a good job you are offered in the medical center. They think highly of you there.”

Dr. Liang was delighted. She invariably took the children’s part against him and he had braced himself for her stand against him now.

He rose. “You see, my son! You can scarcely disobey both parents. Your mother speaks wisely. This is very sensible of you, mother of my sons. Now, please, allow me to do my work. I am in the middle of a very important chapter on Confucius and Communism.”

“Do leave the Communists out of your book,” Mrs. Liang exclaimed. “Otherwise it can’t sell.”

“No, no,” he said humorously, “you don’t understand. It is all in joke.”

“But why joke about them?” she asked.

“Come, come, now, let me do my work.” He commanded and she retreated protesting. When he turned to speak to his son again, he was gone. James had left the room by the door into the dining room.

Dr. Liang stood irresolute for a moment. Then he sighed, pulled out a large silk handkerchief from the pocket of his expensive dark broadcloth suit, wiped his face and hands, and sat down before his desk.

Outside his father’s deeply carpeted study James found his sister Mary. She was a small slight girl who could easily have looked not more than twelve years old except that her dress was that of a twenty-year-old young woman, which she was. Her hands were clenched tightly on her breast and her pretty face was anxious.

“You sent Mother in!” James whispered.

“But to quarrel with Father!” she whispered back. “It’s so hopeless.”

They tiptoed away hand in hand through the hall and opened the door and went into the lobby outside. James pushed the button for the elevator. “Father always forces a quarrel,” he said. “Will you be cold without your coat?”

“No — the sun is warm enough. Jim, why do you let yourself be forced?”

“I don’t know.” His voice was helpless and his face grim.

The elevator clattered, the gate banged open and they entered. They were silent before the elevator man, although they knew him well and were fond of him. Whatever their division behind their own doors, the Liang family presented a calm front before the people in whose land they were aliens.

“Nice day,” the elevator man offered.

“Fine,” they answered together.

They left the elevator decorously, side by side. James was tall and Mary came below his shoulder. The elevator man watched them affectionately. “Nice kids, even if they are Chinese!” he told the second elevator man. “You never see them comin’ in drunk and havin’ to be hauled up like some of the rest of ’em.”

The second elevator man scratched his head with his forefinger. “The old Chink is kinda stingy, I notice.”

“Don’t ask us no favors, though — no dogs to drag out in all kinds of weather.”

“Nice family,” the other agreed, and yawned.

Out in the sunshine James walked along the street with the long noiseless step that was his inheritance of grace. Mary took two steps to his one. The street was quiet, for it was far uptown. To their left now was the river, spanned by the George Washington Bridge. This bridge had deeply affected their lives. As children it had made them imagine bridges over oceans to China, and it had persuaded them to believe that it was always possible to cross stretches of hardship and unhappiness and set foot on other shores. It had made Peter, by the time he was ten, decide to be an engineer.

“Did Father say you could go?” Mary asked.

“No — and Mother only helped him — not me.”

“Oh, and she promised!” Mary cried.

“She said something about staying here for a year or two. You know what she means. She wants me to marry and have a son.”

“How can she be so old-fashioned?” Mary moaned. “She might as well have lived her whole life in our village!”

James shrugged his broad shoulders and lifted his hand to push back the lock of strong black hair that the river wind had blown over his forehead. “I’m not thinking only of my self,” he said. “I’m thinking of you, too, Mary. If I can’t go, they won’t let you.”

“I suppose you could ask Lili to marry you now,” Mary suggested. “That would be a compromise, wouldn’t it? Let’s sit down, Jim. The wind beats at me and blows the words out of my mouth.”

He turned to the benches that stood near the railing above the river and chose an empty one at some distance from the others. A curve in the embankment sheltered them, and the sun poured down upon them.

“You’ll think me a coward,” he said abruptly. “I’ve never told Lili that I want to go home.”

“I know you haven’t,” his sister said in her sweet voice. “But I’ve told her, Jim.”

“Mary!” His cry was mingled with reproof and relief. “Without asking me!”

She nodded her head. Putting up her little hand she brushed back the strands of her soft straight black hair which had escaped from the two thick braids wound about her head. “I had to make her see how much it meant to you.”

She was too delicately kind to say that Lili Li, to whom he had been secretly engaged for eight days, might not want to live in China.

“What did she say?” Fine tense lines sprang to life in his face. The calm of his outward manner was a habit, worn as separately as a coat which he took off or put on.

“She didn’t say anything — she just looked at me,” Mary replied. “You know the way she looks.”

“I know.”

They were silent for a while, gazing out over the river. Ships shone in the sunlight. A man-of-war glittered with flying flags. A yacht, bright with brass, steamed busily toward the harbor. Across the river an enormous sign announced a pleasure park.

James knew very well the way that Lili Li could look. Her great dark eyes were like oval gems of onyx set into the smoothness of her soft face. Her lips were full and rested sweetly together. She painted them, as all girls did, and they looked like a red camellia against the cream of her skin. Silence was her charm. Where other Chinese girls were chattering and restless, in imitation of American girls, Lili was quiet, and every movement was slow and all her slender body was rich with repose. The Li family had come from Shanghai only a year ago, Mr. Li for a gall-bladder operation by American doctors and Mrs. Li to see that Lili, the only child, was educated in American schools. They were wealthy and kindly, and they were frankly glad to be in a country where life was still comfortable. Mr. Li, a prudent man, had years ago sold his silk mills to the Japanese and had deposited his fortune in American banks.

James had fallen in love with Lili at first sight, but she was not easily won. At first she had been shocked at his impetuous proposal, made at the annual New Year’s party given by Dr. and Mrs. Liang. She was too sophisticated, as a Shanghai girl, to declare that he should first approach her parents. She compromised between new and old customs by dropping her head, touching her embroidered handkerchief to her lips, and saying that she did not want to marry anybody, not for a long time, because she wanted to finish her education. It took months of constant attendance upon her, buttressed by many courtesies from Dr. Liang to Mr. Li and much advice and practical aid from Mrs. Liang to Mrs. Li on the difficulties of finding a proper place to live and on the strange behavior of American servants, before Mr. and Mrs. Li would advise their daughter to yield even slightly to young Dr. Liang’s advances. Mr. Li had meanwhile learned, from sources which seemed naturally open to him in whatever country he was, that Dr. Liang, while not a rich man in the sense of big business, was nevertheless comfortably well off, that he had a high place in society as a scholar and a writer, and that the Li family would gain in prestige by the marriage. Moreover, Dr. James Liang was a brilliant young physician and he would undoubtedly be very rich some day, if he stayed in New York.

Meanwhile Mrs. Li had become anxious, as she grew familiar with American life on the streets of New York, lest Lili be attacked by American ruffians and robbed of her virtue, or, almost worse, lest some American fall in love with her and want to marry her. She was afraid that she and Mr. Li, who were both mild people, might not have the courage to refuse their daughter to an ardent and desperate American. Therefore they had made known their growing approval of the Liang family to Lili, and Lili had accepted James.

Nevertheless she did not wish to let her parents think her the usual old-fashioned obedient Chinese daughter, and so she had told Jim very shyly, after his proposal and her acceptance, that she did not want anybody to know at least for a whole week. To this he had agreed because it gave him time to persuade his father to let him go to China. With that permission he would tell Lili that they would make their home in Peking itself. The Liang ancestral lands and village were only about a hundred li south of the city. He was lucky, he told himself, that he would have as his wife a real Chinese girl instead of an American-born Chinese who might be very unhappy even in her own country.

He moved restlessly on the bench beside his sister and then he got up. “When did you tell Lili?” he asked.

“Yesterday. She telephoned to ask me to go to Radio City with her. You know she doesn’t dare go alone anywhere.”

“That’s her mother,” James said.

“She’s afraid, too,” Mary said.

They had discussed Lili’s tearfulness before, Mary critically and James with defense. “Inevitably Lili was affected by the war, even in Shanghai,” he now said. Mary did not answer. She continued to gaze dreamily across the river at the flashing sign of the amusement park. She had seen that sign all her life but she had never been to the park. Peter and Louise went every summer and came back weary with laughter and half sick with spun sugar and popcorn, both of which she hated. But most of all she hated loud voices and catcalling, whistling young white men. She loathed the touch of their flesh. Her heart was full of dreams about the country she had never seen, yet to which she belonged, where her own people lived. She could believe nothing but good about China, nothing but what was brave about her people. When Madame Chiang had visited America she had been in her first year of high school, and without hope of meeting her. But she had seen her, flashing in and out of hospitals, in and out of great cars, in and out of hotels, and always proud and beautiful. She had made a scrap book of the newspaper photographs.

“I’m going to see Lili now,” James said suddenly.

Mary looked at her watch. It was still early. “Hadn’t you better telephone first?” she asked. “She may not be up. You know how Mrs. Li is — she plays mah-jongg all night, and Lili stays up—”

“I’ll go on the chance,” he replied.

“What will you tell her, Jim?” Mary asked. “You can’t very well say that you are going—”

“Why not?” he asked.

“But if even Mother wants you to wait?”

“If Lili is willing, we’ll be married right away — and we’ll go together.”

“What if—” Mary broke off and shook her head.

“What if she isn’t willing?” Jim asked. “I’ll face that — if I must. So long—”

He nodded and walked away, and Mary looked after him thoughtfully. Inside her small neat head her life was planned as carefully as one of the outlines she prepared in her class in child hygiene. She was going to China, too. Jim did not know it yet, but she did. Whether he was married or not, she was going. If he married — well, Lili was helpless and she could help her. Lili knew nothing at all about housekeeping and children. Mrs. Li had always said there were plenty of servants in China and so what was the use of teaching Lili to do things she would never have to do?

Mary watched her brother out of sight, then she rose, shook her skirts, and tripped back to the big apartment house. She had promised Peter to make shrimp flakes, for no one else would take the trouble, and he loved to eat them while he studied at night. To have the radio turned on full blast, to reach out for handfuls of shrimp flakes while he memorized with such ease the laws of physics — this combination of activities satisfied Peter’s whole nature.

Mr. and Mrs. Li had found an apartment on the next street in from the river. It was a sublease from a European motion-picture actress who was at present having one of her wrestling matches with Hollywood. It had been impossible to find an apartment on long lease and next to impossible to get a sublease. Almost any American, at the sight of Mr. Li’s fat, kind, yellow face, declared that he had decided not to sublet, after all. Mrs. Liang, who was the interpreter and manager on these occasions, had been filled with fury, but she did not wish to let her new friends know that they were unwelcome in this country of refuge. Besides, she knew that they were not really unwelcome. Shopkeepers would rejoice in Mrs. Li’s easy purchases and Mr. Li’s ready checkbook. The unwillingness lay in some undefined region which Mrs. Liang preferred not to probe.

Secretly she hated and despised all Americans, but this she kept to herself. Someday when the dreadful discomforts of present China had changed to the solid, pleasantly lazy life of the old normal days, when they had all gone home, and when she had filled her house with servants and once more had nothing to do, she would tell her best friends all that she knew and felt about Americans. It would take a long time and she would not do it until she knew she need never come back to America again. Meanwhile she dared not release herself. She had plodded from agency to agency, had studied the newspapers with her shortsighted eyes, spelling out to herself the advertisements of apartments, and had been rewarded one day by finding this handsome place where the owner had no feeling against Chinese, since she herself was only French.

Julie de Rougemont had laughed a great deal at Mr. Li, who had been only too charmed with her, and within twenty-four hours the Li family was comfortably settled in a highly modern apartment, whose three baths vied with each other in magnificence. Mrs. Li had disliked the mirrored ceiling in the one she used because she did not enjoy looking at herself as she lay in the tub or, did she chance to look up, the sight of herself moving squatly about on the floor, and so she had ordered the mirrors painted, in spite of the lease which insisted that no alterations were to be made. Of the family only Lili seemed to suit the apartment. Lili, slim in her gorgeous and extreme Chinese gowns, matched the modern settees and tables, the blond rugs, the sleek draperies. The French woman had screamed with pleasure at the sight of Lili.

“Ah, what beauty!” she had sighed. “What skin — what hands — and the eyes, mon Dieu!”

Mr. and Mrs. Li had looked at their daughter with new respect, but Lili had given no sign of pleasure. Her red mouth, her dark eyes, had remained sweetly unmoved.

At the door of this apartment James now pressed a small button, jeweled with luminous glass. He could hear the soft murmur of voices speaking Chinese. At the sound of the bell they stopped. There was silence, and then after a moment Lili herself opened the door.

“Lili,” he cried. “I was hoping you were at home.”

Her manner, perfectly decorous, softened. She turned her head and called, “Ma, it is only James.”

The rooms came to sudden life. Somewhere Mr. Li coughed and spat heartily and groaned. Mrs. Li shouted in Chinese, “Come in, come in — we are drinking tea. Ha, you — Lili, what’s the servant woman’s name?”

“Mollie,” said Lili.

“Mah-lee,” Mrs. Li shouted in English, “more watah, velly hot! Teapot!”

A maid with a scared white face hastened in, fetched the teapot and hurried out again. Mrs. Li looked after her with kindly contempt. “These foreigners,” she said confidentially to James, “they are not good servants. They do not understand proper relations. This Mah-lee, she does not ask me how I feel in the morning. She gives me no small attentions. Naturally, I give her no wine money — only her wages. She is discontented, I can see, but why should I pay for what I do not get?”

She looked about and laughed. Then she patted the chair next her. “Sit down,” she told James. “How is your mother? And your learned father, is he working? He works too hard!”

James bowed first to Mr. Li and then to Mrs. Li. “Both my parents are well, and you, sir? And you, madame?”

“He,” Mrs. Li pointed her chin at Mr. Li, “he coughs a great deal. It is this damp river air.”

“I coughed in Shanghai, too,” Mr. Li said.

“So you did,” Mrs. Li agreed. “It was the damp river air there, also. All rivers are alike, full of water, which is damp.”

No one could deny this. The maid brought in the teapot and Lili poured the tea in silence and handed bowls to everybody prettily with both hands.

It was ill luck indeed, James told himself, that he had found Mr. and Mrs. Li both here. It would not occur to them, he knew, to leave him alone with Lili. Why, they would ask themselves, should anyone wish them gone? However long he stayed they would continue to sit in amiable conversation. Nor would Lili move to leave them or to suggest their leaving. She sat gracefully leaning against the back of a green satin chair and looking completely beautiful.

“It is such a nice day,” James said helplessly. “I came to see if Lili would take a little walk with me.”

Lili looked at her mother and Mrs. Li nodded. “It is bright daylight,” she observed. “I see no reason against it. The sunshine will be healthy for you but do not let it burn your face. If you sit down, let it be in the shade.”

“I cannot understand these Americans,” Mr. Li said in his husky rumbling voice. “They dislike their black people yet they let the sun burn them all as black as white people can get.”

“Everybody likes darker people best,” Mrs. Li said briskly. “It is only that the white people are rough and like to order others here and there.”

“Shall we go?” James asked Lili.

She rose and went to a closet and brought out a pink silk parasol and a black patent-leather handbag.

“Have you money in your purse?” Mr. Li inquired.

“Only about twenty dollars,” Lili replied.

“Give her a little more,” Mrs. Li coaxed. “She might see a bit of jewelry.”

Mr. Li reached into the depths of his loose Chinese robe and pulled out a bulging wallet and peeled off eight ten-dollar notes. “Anything over one hundred American dollars you had better let me look at, lest the foreigners cheat you,” he told his daughter in Shanghai dialect.

She took the money, pouting a little. James bowed his farewells and Mrs. Li demanded that he return to eat his midday meal with them.

“Eat with us and I will make a dish myself — say shrimps and cabbage,” she said.

“Another day,” James replied courteously. “Today I am not very hungry.”

He went out with Lili, conscious of her beauty, and they stood side by side as they went down in the elevator, their shoulders barely touching. In the street he scarcely knew how to begin. He was sure that Lili would not speak until he introduced some subject, and whether he should begin to speak at once about going to China he did not know. He looked at her and she turned her head and smiled at him slightly. She wore her hair long on her shoulders in the American fashion, and a fringe curled over her forehead. Under this fringe her eyes, set shallowly beneath her penciled brows, were large and wide open and very black. This pretty face, so flowerlike, comforted James with its calm. In spite of the quiet surface of his own family there were sharp tensions between them all, and the sharper because they were so earnestly hidden until they burst forth in some uncontrollable crisis. Mary, he often felt, for all her helpfulness and adoration for him, was too strong natured and stubborn for a girl. Her smallness was entirely deceiving, for when her will was set she was overpowering. Even their father sometimes shrugged his shoulders and yielded to her tearless determination. She never cried, however angry or hurt she was.

Lili, James felt, was entirely different and therefore adorable. She was soft and yielding and she cried easily. He had seen tears swim into her great eyes when Mr. Li was impatient with her over some trifle. This made him angry and he promised himself that he would always be a patient and kind husband. How could he be otherwise? He longed to take her hand, but she was impeded by the parasol and her handbag.

“Let me hold the parasol,” he urged.

She gave it to him, and he reached for her hand and placed it in his arm. “Not in the street!” she exclaimed.

“Here it is quite proper,” he assured her. “Where shall we go?”

“To Radio City, please,” she replied.

“But I thought you and Mary went there only yesterday?”

“Please, I want to go again today,” she pleaded.

He had not the heart to refuse her, and yet it would be impossible to talk if they were watching a picture. She would sit completely absorbed, oblivious to all except the wonder of the story upon the screen, of which, he often discovered, she had comprehended only the more spectacular effects.

“It is either too late or too early,” he said playfully. “If we go now we cannot return in time for the midday meal. It is too early for the afternoon picture. Let us just walk along the streets and sit down perhaps on a bench and watch the river. Besides, I want to talk to you, Lili, very seriously.”

She did not protest this decision, and he led her to a bench on the river front, and they sat down. He leaned the open parasol on the back of the bench and it shielded them pleasantly from the street. Before them the river spread a sheet of tumbled silver. She looked at the river but he looked at her. He had never kissed her, to his own surprise. It was simply because he did not know what she would think of it. Yet she had seen kisses between men and women on the screen.

“Lili,” he said gently.

She turned her long-lashed eyes toward him. The lashes were straight, not curled as were the lashes of American girls, and they were very thick. Her lips did not move.

“Will you let me kiss you?” he asked in the same gentle voice.

She looked to the right and left. No one was near. She opened her bag, took out a paper tissue, wiped the red from her lips, and with an air of patience she put up her face to be kissed. He hesitated, confounded by her performance. Then he could not resist the ready lips and he bent his head and kissed her. Her head pressed against his arm on the back of the bench and she closed her eyes. Her lips were cool and she did not open them. He smelled the gardenia scent of her skin. Then he lifted his swimming head.

“You don’t find it strange — to kiss?”

Now that the kiss was over she took a small mirror and a lipstick from her handbag and reddened her lips carefully and examined her hair. Then she shook her head. “Oh, no, James,” she said.

Cold horror fell upon him. “You have kissed other men?”

“Only Americans!” she said.

“Americans!” he cried. “But where?”

“In Shanghai,” she replied. “Some soldiers and two officers.”

“Did they all kiss you?”

“Of course I only allowed the officers more than one time,” she said. She was gazing at the river again and he could look at her pure and perfect profile.

“But Lili, you didn’t love them!” He pressed her hand to his breast.

“No, not at all,” she replied.

“Then why, dear?”

“They asked me, and I said why, and they said for good feeling between Americans and Chinese, and so courteously I did.”

He laughed loudly at this, and then silently cursed the men who had taken advantage of her ignorance. “Please promise me you will never kiss any other man but me, Lili. It is not right, you know. Only engaged people and husband and wife should kiss.”

She looked at him now with some alarm. “You mean, the officers were bad men?”

“I’m afraid so, dear.” He did not want to hurt her, or disillusion her too quickly.

She pondered this for a moment, her face moved with distaste. “They did smell very bad,” she said. “And I do promise you, James. For I do not like to kiss very much.”

“Only me,” he insisted.

She smiled at this and lifted her hand. “Kiss my hand, please, so I don’t have so much trouble to take off and on lipstick.”

He laughed, detecting in the corners of her long eyes the hint of a sparkle, and he put the delicate scented hand to his lips and then held it while he talked.

“Lili, now that we are alone, I must tell you what I want more than anything in the world after we are married. I want to go back to China, dear, and do my work there in our own country.”

There was not a quiver in the narrow hand he held.

“Are you willing for that, Lili?” he asked gently.

“Oh, yes,” she said readily. “If my parents agree.”

“Do you think they will agree?” he asked anxiously.

“Oh, no,” she said in the same ready voice. “I think they will not. We had too much trouble in Shanghai.”

“Then, darling,” he exclaimed, “what shall we do?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “Please, James, you think of something else.”

“You mean — not go?”

“Yes, please!”

She took his hand and suddenly pressed it to her cheek. “Please stay here,” she begged. “Radio City is so nice!”

“But darling, I have work to do,” he urged.

“You will have a good job,” she reminded him.

She was so lovely in her childlike sweetness that he had not the heart to reproach her. “But China needs us, dear. Think how few hospitals there are! I want someday to make a big hospital where sick people can come and be healed.”

“Chinese people are too poor to pay hospitals,” she said.

“But in my hospital the rich will help pay for the poor,” he urged.

She laughed at this. “Rich people don’t want to pay for them,” she said shrewdly.

He felt himself caught in some sort of a net, so soft as to be intangible, and yet he was floundering in it. “Lili, answer me straight. Will you come to China with me?”

“If my father says so,” she told him.

“Is that a promise, darling?”

“I promise,” she said in her sweet ready way.

“We’ll live in Peking,” he murmured.

“I like Peking,” she agreed. “Such nice shops there! Oh, that remembers me — I haven’t spent my money.” She rose and smiled down at him with the witchery of a child. “Come, please — I want to buy something. A taxi, please!”

He rose and called a cab and she sat down luxuriously.

“Fifth Avenue near the park,” she called.

They were put down below Central Park and with the ease of many such trips she went into one expensive shop and then another. At the end of an hour and a half she returned to the first shop she had entered and bought a set of costume jewelry that cost exactly one hundred dollars including the tax. She laughed while she waited for the package. “I was so stupid when I came to New York, James,” she confided to him. “I thought I must offer half the price as asked. Now I know with Americans it is not so. You always give them what they want.”

He saw the saleswoman gazing at her with admiration and even astonishment at her beauty, and he was proud that she was Chinese — and that she was his. He bent to whisper in her ear, “Only — not kisses!”

She shook her head. “No — only not that.”

It was long past noon when he returned her to her parents. Mr. Li was restless with hunger, and he exclaimed at the sight of his daughter. “How long you have been! My belly is thundering.”

“What did you buy?” Mrs. Li asked.

It was, James saw, no hour to talk with Mr. Li, and he bade them farewell. Lili followed him to the door. “I will come tonight and ask your father,” he said.

“Please do,” she said sweetly and shut the door.

At the door of his own home Mary met him, as silent as a little cat. “Will she go?” she demanded in a whisper.

“Yes,” James said, “if her father will let her.”

“And if he will not?”

“He must,” James replied.

“Ha!” Mary cried under her breath.

“Come!” their mother’s voice sang at them from the dining room. “Come, eat — the food is hot — don’t let the food get cold. Father doesn’t like cold food.”

“Coming,” Mary cried.

“Coming, Mother,” James echoed.

There could be no talk or argument at the table. Dr. Liang insisted on perfect calm at his meals. He stood behind his chair in abstracted silence waiting for his family to gather. Mrs. Liang bustled through the rooms calling and compelling.

When James and Mary entered the dining room she was hurrying upstairs, her somewhat thick figure toiling its way on half-bound feet. In her childhood her feet had been bound, but when her family discovered that the little boy to whom they had betrothed her years before had grown up into a fastidious and modern young man who swore with ferocity that he would not marry a woman with bound feet, they had hastened to unbind them as far as it was possible. Dr. Liang had never acknowledged that his wife once had bound feet. He had declared to Americans until he believed himself that the custom of binding the feet of young females had died out of China sometime in the last century. “Somewhat earlier than you Westerners stopped binding the waists of your women,” he was fond of saying with his charming smile. “I flatter myself,” he said next, “that our race was less injured than yours, since important organs were not, luckily for us, located in the feet of our women!” Nothing enraged him more profoundly than to have a luckless missionary, newly home from China, maintain that there was still foot-binding going on in remote villages.

“It is not true,” he would say with high dignity. “As a Chinese I know.”

He looked up now as his two elder children came in. “Let us sit down,” he told them. “I hear your mother screaming on the upper floor, and doubtless Peter and Louise will join us soon.”

He began to sup the chicken broth and bean vermicelli with audible satisfaction. Among Americans he would have drunk silently but with his own family it was a pleasure to relax, he declared, and act as a real Chinese.

No one spoke while he ate. Peter came in and sat down. He was a pleasant-looking boy of seventeen, so thin that his long neck was ludicrous. His features were large and unusually strongly marked, and his forehead was high. Dr. Liang found it difficult not to make fun of this son of his, but today because he was displeased with James he felt kindly toward Peter.

“You were working on some physics but a few days ago,” he said courteously. “I have not heard the outcome.”

“I received a mark of ninety-seven, Father,” Peter said. By concentration he could keep his voice down, and he achieved this sentence without a squawk.

“Good son,” Dr. Liang exclaimed. “Drink your soup while it is hot.”

Mrs. Liang bustled in at this moment, sweating apologies. Louise followed, looking sulky. She was sixteen, taller than Mary, and very pretty. Her short hair was extravagantly curled and she wore a tight red dress and high-heeled black pumps. She had been crying, and Mrs. Liang looked at her crossly as she sat down heavily at her place.

“Think what this girl of ours has been doing!” she said.

Dr. Liang stared at his youngest child. “She has been crying. Why have you scolded her?” Louise was his favorite child and the whole family knew it.

“After all you have said about waist-binding,” Mrs. Liang complained. She gulped her soup between sentences, to Dr. Liang’s intense disgust. “She was binding her waist — that’s what she was doing! Before the mirror! Her face was all red.”

“But why?” Dr. Liang asked, staring at Louise.

“Because why?” Mrs. Liang answered in a loud voice. “Now it is fashionable again, it seems. The Americans are wanting very small waists.”

“We are Chinese,” Dr. Liang said mildly. He continued to gaze at Louise. “Never forget, my child — we are aliens here. This is not our civilization. We must not forget our sources. Our women are beautiful because they are natural.”

The four young people lowered their heads and drank assiduously of the soup in the bowls. Mrs. Liang tipped her bowl, and shouted toward the kitchen, “Neh-lee, Neh-lee!”

The maid Nellie came in quickly, gathered the dishes and brought in bowls of food on a tray. Mrs. Liang watched her sharply while Dr. Liang talked to Louise.

“We should set the example, my child. I often ask Heaven why it is that I am sent here, an exile from my beloved country. Heaven does not answer but my heart makes reply. I have a mission here. My children have a mission, too. We must show this vast new country what it is to be Chinese. Now if you bind your waist, even as the Americans — and can it be true that this vile and harmful practice is again to be adopted?”

“Oh, Father, don’t worry,” Mary cried out. “Louise won’t be uncomfortable for long, you may be sure of that. She loves to eat.”

“Shut up,” Louise whispered under her breath.

Dr. Liang put down his chopsticks. Mrs. Liang had served a large bowl of rice with vegetables and had set it in front of him. This was his family bowl. When guests were present he used a small bowl, a gentleman’s bowl, he laughingly explained. Only peasants used large bowls.

“But I thought most of the people of China were peasants,” the guest would reply. Dr. Liang deprecated this with a graceful left hand. He used his left hand for gesturing.

“An unfortunate impression,” he always said gently. “Due, I am afraid, to best sellers about China — written by Americans. A very limited point of view, naturally. It is quality that is meaningful in any nation, the articulate few, the scholars. Surely men like myself represent more perfectly than peasants can the spirit of Chinese civilization. Our nation has always been ruled by our intellectuals. Our emperors depended upon wise men.”

“Mary!” he now cried sharply, “do not be cruel to your younger sister. Louise, do not be rude to your older sister. The family relationships must be preserved.”

“Eh, eh, eat your food, all of you,” Mrs. Liang cried impetuously. “When your stomachs are full you will feel better. I made this beef and cabbage myself. Here, father of my sons—”

She reached across the table with her chopsticks in her right hand and picked a tender bit of beef from the dish and put it on Dr. Liang’s heap of rice. “Now come — the children will all be good. It will rouse your ulcers to be angry at mealtime.”

Like many Chinese intellectuals, as well as rich men, Dr. Liang suffered from the threat of stomach ulcers. Mrs. Liang declared that it was the excessive restraint of his temper which went to his stomach. “You should let your temper out,” she sometimes urged her husband in private. “Be angry with the children when you feel like it, but between meals. Slap Mary or twist Peter’s ears — it will make you feel better. It is hard on you to have no servants who will bear with a little anger now and then. You felt better when we were in China for that reason. There the ricksha coolie was especially patient — remember? Here you have no way of venting your anger. It stays in your belly and makes boils.”

“I hope I am a truly superior man in the Confucian sense, whether I am in China or America,” Dr. Liang had replied.

“Confucius died of stomach trouble, too,” she had retorted.

This he had not answered, remembering that Confucius himself had said that the superior man must be patient with women, children, and fools.

Now he fell to eating heartily. For so slender a man his appetite was large, and to his wife entirely satisfactory. Nothing gave Mrs. Liang a greater sense of success as a wife than the sight of her husband eating his food with enjoyment. She was irked that her own pleasure was checked by a frame that ran easily to fat, and she was sometimes made melancholy by the sight of her husband’s spare and graceful body when he bathed himself. Did he compare her solid shape to the naked outlines of American women? She had long ago refused to go to seashore resorts after one visit to Atlantic City. How could even Dr. Liang keep his virtue in that place? Yet such was American life that he had only to open the page of a magazine, left about carelessly by one of the children, to see even in his own house the pictures of evil females. American women she considered whores without exception when they were young and some although they were middle-aged. Even white-haired dowagers made over Dr. Liang in a manner that could only be called whorish.

She did not believe that her husband, left to himself, could ever be unfaithful to her or to the children. Had she not borne him two handsome sons? Yet the memory of their arranged marriage rankled in her. True, her father had yielded to the extent of allowing them to meet for fifteen minutes, one day, under his own supervision. She had been a tongue-tied girl of eighteen. She could still feel her cheeks burn at that memory. But the tall extremely handsome young man who stood gazing at her then seemed now to have nothing to do with her husband, Dr. Liang. Whether he ever remembered that meeting under the eyes of the watchful old man, she did not know. He had never spoken of it. Even on their wedding night, six months later, he had made no reference to it. Nevertheless he had gone on with the marriage. She had not, she supposed, been too ugly, and in those days she was not fat, although certainly not thin, even then. Her cheeks had been round and red with a high color that tended to grow purple in cold weather. Her plump girlish hands were always chilblained in winter until she came to America.

She had been thoroughly afraid of her husband on her wedding night. He was methodical and almost completely silent. Not until she was sure that there was no more to marriage did she recover her natural and somewhat loud gaiety. By that time she knew she was indispensable to him. She still was, and this kept her fairly careless in mind, except when Dr. Liang began to write poetry, which he sometimes did. These poems were woven about women entirely different from herself and they alarmed her. She searched with jealous eyes their entire acquaintance in New York to discover, if possible, someone who resembled even remotely these ladies of his imagination. Such resemblances were difficult to fasten upon, since his poems were all about ladies who had lived centuries ago in Chinese history. The Fragrant Concubine, for example, was one of his favorites, a delicate lady who when she perspired exuded scent instead of sweat.

“I doubt there was ever this woman,” she had exclaimed when Dr. Liang read aloud to some American friends a poem he had written in honor of the Fragrant Concubine.

“She lives in history,” Dr. Liang had answered firmly. He looked about the group of earnest American faces. “And in my heart, perhaps,” he had added smiling.

Mrs. Liang had quarreled with him that night in her good hearty fashion. “You!” she had cried, scolding and shaking her forefinger at him while he undressed for his bath. “Starting scandal with these Americans!”

He had forgotten the episode and when she saw this she would have been glad to stop there. But some time or other it would happen again and so she went on. “Talking about fragrant concubines!” she stormed.

He had laughed at her. “There was only one,” he said, folding his trousers carefully and putting them over the foot of the double brass bed.

“The Americans are so sexy!” she had complained. She spoke in Chinese but the word “sexy” she always used in English. “You should speak to them otherwise.”

“You are jealous,” he said with pleasure.

“Of a dead woman?” she shrieked.

“Of any woman.”

“If you take a woman, I will take a man,” she said boldly.

At this he had laughed immoderately. “Come,” he said, leaning on the foot of the bed. “You and I will have a race — you for a man, I for a woman! I will buy you a jade ring and bracelet if you win yours first.”

She had been properly scandalized at this. “Come to bed, you old man! Stop talking like Americans.”

“A little more beef,” she said now to her husband as they sat at their family meal. He held out his bowl obediently.

“I shall have to have a nap,” he complained.

“It will be good for you,” she replied. “You are not too young to sleep a little in the middle of the day.”

Around them their four children ate in silence, dipping into the dishes in the middle of the table. Mrs. Liang did not tolerate the presence of the maid Nellie while they ate. All of them enjoyed their food better when they dipped for themselves from the middle dishes, but only the children did so in front of the maid, and not then in the mother’s presence. Mrs. Liang had scolded them one day when, coming back from a luncheon in Dr. Liang’s honor, she had discovered her four children hunched over the table eating with bowls in their hands, dipping with their chopsticks from the main dishes and chattering with the maid.

“Why shouldn’t we act like Chinese since we are Chinese?” James had demanded.

“You in medical school learning about American germs!” Mrs. Liang had cried for the benefit of Nellie.

She had hustled the children from their meal, and waiting until the maid was gone she had presented their iniquity to their father. Dr. Liang had been judicial. “The germ theory is true, of course,” he had told his children, “but the immunity of our people to certain germs is very high. Then, too, in one family, there is not much danger. I myself would not care to dip my chopsticks into a bowl with unknown persons even of our own race. But your mother is right. Americans tend to think too little of us, and we should not therefore lend ourselves to their low opinion.”

The meal was over; Mrs. Liang produced a box of chocolates which she loved, and Nellie came in and poured hot tea and went away again. Mrs. Liang belched comfortably and Dr. Liang looked at her sadly but in silence. He had eaten too well to reprove her and he rose, yawned, and went to his room to sleep. Mrs. Liang went into the living room and sat down in a deep chair, and, reclining her head she closed her eyes.

In the dining room the four young people were left alone together. Mary folded her arms on the table and leaned on them.

“Are you going to tell Peter and Louise?” she asked.

“What has Jim done now?” Peter asked. He was gobbling chocolates, hunting with his long forefinger for the cream-filled ones.

“He has asked Lili to go back to China with him as soon as they are married, and Lili says she will — if her papa lets her,” Mary’s mischievous voice echoed Lili’s soft Chinese pronunciation, “Baba.”

“No kidding!” Peter exclaimed.

“I am going, too,” Mary announced.

The three of them turned on her. “Who said?” Louise demanded.

“I say,” Mary declared. “I’ve made up my mind. All this child hygiene — why do you think I have been taking that?”

“So you can be a good mother,” Louise said wickedly.

“Oh, shut up!”

Without their parents the four of them were wholly American. Not seeing them, hearing only their voices, none could have heard a difference.

“I think Jim ought to go first and blaze the trail for the rest of us,” Peter cried. With excitement his long neck seemed to grow longer.

“How’s Jim going?” Louise asked. “It costs oodles of money.”

“I’ve been offered a job,” Jim said slowly.

“Oh, where, Jim?”

“In Peking, in the big hospital there.”

“Lucky stiff,” Peter muttered.

All of them were sick to get to China, all except Louise, and she dared not say she was not. Alone sometimes she was frightened at the thought of China. She loved America. Her days were pure fun, mingled with brief hours of work at high school, and away from her family she lived a life which she concealed from them altogether. She was gay and popular, and she danced well and sang as clearly as a Chinese lark. An American boy had fallen in love with her. No one knew except her best friend Estelle, who was his sister. Romantic Estelle begged them to marry, and Louise spent long hours in exciting conversation. The only trouble was that Philip had not asked Louise to marry him.

“There’s a hitch, though,” Jim said soberly. “Lili wants her father to agree to her going.”

There was a chorus of snorts at this. “Marry her first,” Peter advised in a manly voice. “When you’re married you can do what you like. Be a Chinese for once — make your wife obey you.”

Jim smiled at him and shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said. “I’m afraid I shan’t make a very good Chinese husband, Pete.”

“Aw, get tough,” Peter urged. “Don’t let ’em lick you, Jim. Remember you’re our pilot.”

James looked around the table at their faces. Peter was eager; Mary was determined, and Louise looked remote and dreaming. They were all depending on him, their elder brother, the head of the family after their father. The head of the family! When he was that he’d have them all in China where they belonged.

“You can trust me,” he said. “I won’t give up.”

He was somewhat daunted, however, by Lili’s air of resolute calm when she arose with undulant grace to meet him that evening, as he entered the elaborate living room of the Li apartment. She put out her hand and took his and led him to the sofa where she had been sitting. On the sofa opposite, Mr. and Mrs. Li sat with some formality and their faces were solemn. When he greeted them they inclined their heads and did not speak and he knew at once that Lili had told them what he had asked. He knew, too, that they had discussed the matter and had decided what their answer would be. Their reserve frightened him. Were they favorable surely they would not have looked so grave. He concealed his fears and sat down beside Lili, accepted the tea she offered him, and declined the suggestion of what she called “viskee-sodah” from the small tray on the table in front of the empty ornate fireplace. They were being very Chinese, he realized, and a mingling of stubbornness and humor with his dismay made him determine to be also as Chinese as he could.

“The night is mild,” he announced. “The sky is the color of rain.” Because he did not want to speak English tonight he spoke in Mandarin Chinese, native to him but foreign to Mrs. Li’s Shanghai-bred tongue.

Nevertheless she answered him in an attempt at the same language. “The river will grow more damp, and it will be bad for our cough.”

James drank a little tea and set down the bowl. “There are many varieties of climate in this large country,” he remarked. “Would it not be well for you to travel to the West where the air is dry and there is constant sunshine?”

Mrs. Li shook her head. “We cannot leave New York,” she sighed. “It is like Shanghai. And where else can we buy fresh ginger and bamboo shoots? In Chinatown the markets are at least as good as in small towns in our own land.”

Mr. Li rumbled forth his cough. “The soy sauce is quite good here,” he remarked.

Lili said nothing. She sat in repose, her exquisite hands crossed on the lap of her apple-green satin robe. She wore a white gardenia in her hair and green jade earrings. The scent of the gardenia wrapped her in fragrant air, and stole into the young man’s heart. He grew impatient with the slow preambles of Chinese courtesy and he suddenly cast them aside. Leaning forward he addressed himself to Mr. Li in English.

“Sir, I think Lili has told you that I have asked her to marry me very soon and go with me to China. I have come to ask your permission.”

Mrs. Li rose immediately. “Come, child,” she said to Lili in her Shanghai dialect. “We shall leave this matter to the two men.”

Lili obeyed, and Mr. Li maintained a grave silence while they left the room together. When they were gone he rose and went to the door and closed it. He wore tonight Chinese robes which covered his portly figure and gave him great dignity. James had seen him until now only in the new Western clothes he had bought when he first came to America, and although they were expensive and of excellent quality, they did not suit his shoulders rounded from a lifetime in comfortable Chinese garments and they revealed too harshly his hanging belly. The thinness of his legs, too, was concealed now by the long and richly brocaded satin robes of a dull blue. When he returned he sat down beside James and put out his plump tapering fingers and began to talk in Chinese.

“What I am about to say has nothing to do with you.” His Mandarin was stilted but intelligible. Every businessman was compelled to know Mandarin, wherever his home in China. “I am very willing for you to marry Lili. It will be a weight off my mind. But you ask me to allow you to take my daughter back to the country from which we have escaped. Now, do not mistake me. I hate this foreign country and I love our country. But I tell you, times are very bad in China. Even without my gall bladder I found business hard. Only a few of us have money, and since the Americans always want to have fifty-one per cent and we Chinese are determined to keep fifty-one per cent, business stands still. This is why I took the opportunity to come to this country and get my gall bladder cut out. When I go to the operation next month, it would comfort me to think my daughter is married safely to a good young man with ability, such as you are. Then I can die without distress.”

James broke in. “Sir, it is not necessary for you to die. I understand those things and—”

Mr. Li put up his pale soft hand and stopped him. “You are not cutting me open,” he said gently. “Were you holding the knife I would not think of death.”

James quivered with inspiration and anxiety. “Sir, if you can trust me to perform the operation—”

Mr. Li looked instantly alarmed. “No — no—” he exclaimed. “Americans are used to cutting. Besides, you are young and I am an important man.”

He sighed and rubbed his belly with the palm of his hand. “Yet I wish — no, it cannot be. The doctor has been chosen and I have already paid out some money. In the night, I will tell you, I am afraid.”

“Don’t be afraid, sir,” James urged. “The surgeons here are excellent.”

To this Mr. Li replied in a mournful voice, “A Chinese does not willfully kill. But Americans think nothing of it. You did not see their soldiers in Shanghai. They rode about in their small cars and killed anyone in their way. On one street in one day near our house they killed seven people without stopping to find out what they had done. Why should they spare a single old Chinese like me? And, more than that, I have inquired and found that even though I die I must pay them. What injustice is this? Yet I am helpless. I cannot cut open my own belly. If the doctors were Chinese they would not expect to be paid for killing me, as you know. They might expect to be sued. But here it seems doctors cannot commit murder, whomever they kill. I have inquired and I have been told that even the President of America would have to pay his doctor were he killed. As you know, we would never consent to such extortion.”

Mr. Li’s earnest soft voice flowed on and on. He spoke little before his wife and daughter, and when he was alone with a man all this talk came flowing out of him. He felt very near to this handsome young Chinese. He had lost his only son in childhood and he felt he was getting back a son again, one stronger and healthier and better in every way than the poor little boy whose mother had smothered him to death with too much love. Little Ah Fah had died of a dose of opium which Mrs. Li had commanded for a stomachache he had developed after eating too many sweet rice cakes. A zealous but ignorant nursemaid had doubled the dose. Mr. Li had felt himself so confounded and overwhelmed by women that after his son’s death he had withdrawn from life. His sexual impulses, never strong, had left him completely, and he refused the concubine whom Mrs. Li had proposed for him as atonement for her carelessness. Her grief, however, had touched his heart, and at last he turned to her. Outside his enormous and richly decorated house in the French Concession of Shanghai he had been an astute and successful businessman, but at home he was subdued, indulgent, and almost totally silent.

James did not attempt to contradict anything Mr. Li now said. He realized that it was somehow a relief to the older man to pour out all his fears and prejudices and he sat, half smiling, listening, seeming to agree, waiting for the end when he supposed Mr. Li would give his consent.

“Now,” Mr. Li said, “here is what I ask. Do not go back to China for a few years. Later, certainly! I do not wish to be buried here and if I die, as I expect to do, under the foreign knife, my body is to be placed in a metal coffin. The coffin is to be filled with lime and sealed and placed in storage. I do not wish to be buried in this American earth. When the affairs of our country are improved enough for you to take my daughter’s mother, my daughter, and I hope my grandchildren back to Shanghai, my body must go with the family. The house in Shanghai is yours. It is very large, and it is completely furnished, on the eastern side Chinese, on the western side foreign. The garden is very large indeed, at least ten foreign acres, fifty Chinese mou, and there is a very old pine tree in the center of the rock garden. Under the pine tree is a space which I prepared for my grave when I made the garden twenty years ago. The family cemetery is in our village outside Soochow, but I wish to lie for a generation or so among my grandchildren. Later, when you want to be buried there yourself you can have me moved to the family place. By that time I shall be used to being dead and it will not matter. After a hundred years we are all dust.”

James stirred. “Sir, I want to work—”

Mr. Li put up his hand again. “It is not necessary,” he said gently. “I have money enough to support at least five generations. I saw perfectly what the Japanese intended to do. Anyone could see what would happen when the foreigners stopped what they called their first world war. I sold my mills when the Japanese reached Manchuria. By then of course war was inevitable. All my fortune is in banks here in New York. I do not mind telling you that I am one of the largest depositors in three banks in this city.”

Mr. Li smiled dimly and put up his hand again when he saw that once more James was about to speak.

“Wait — this is not all. I will settle everything on you, as my son, on the day I go under the foreign knife. I can trust you. You will take care of an old father and mother. Yes, you will be my real son. I ask only one return — that you will take my name when you marry my daughter; it is an old custom with us, you know, when a man has no son.”

He looked shrewdly at the grave young man who suddenly pressed his lips together and hurried on. “The surname Li is honorable. It is among the Hundred Names. And your father has another son. I am not robbing him. Now then, everything is clear between us. Certainly I give my permission for the wedding. Let it be at once. Say two weeks from today? That gives time for new clothes and the guests to be chosen and so on. It gives me nearly a month before my death. With luck I even hope that before I die my daughter may conceive. Well, that would be very good luck, and that is perhaps too much to ask. Still—” Mr. Li pursed his lips and smiled.

James had no heart to break the old man’s dreams, and yet it must be done. Trained as a surgeon, he went swiftly to the task. “I do not believe you will die, sir,” he said, “and it is better if you do not take it for granted. The mind must help the body to live — we doctors know that. But, sir, please do not ask me to change the plan I have made for my life. I am surnamed Liang, and I must remain what I am born. I thank you deeply and I will be to you as a son, whatever my name.”

Mr. Li winced and tears filled his eyes. James looking away from his face saw the fat white hands lying on the satin lap begin to tremble. He looked away from the hands and went on. “I am glad that you want Lili and our children to live in our own country. So far we are agreed. I have grown up here and it is not good for us. We are exiles, however kind the people. But even that is not why I want to go home. I have a hope — fantastic, perhaps — that I can do some good for my own people.”

“The times are so bad,” Mr. Li’s voice was a wail.

“I know — and that is why I feel I must go back,” James said.

He could not tell Mr. Li what it was that made his purpose hard in his heart. He had never said even to Mary that in some deeply repressed corner of his being he grieved that his own father had chosen to live in exile during the years of their country’s hardship. He knew all the arguments, that a scholar could not work in the midst of turmoil and war. He believed these arguments were true. He knew that his father’s delicately balanced mind needed safety and quiet and security in order to do its work. But he had long ago determined that he would work where he was most needed, in the midst of turmoil, even in war. He would not allow his mind to be delicate nor his heart remote.

Mr. Li came to the attack again, not harshly or boldly but with pleading. “Lili has been gently reared. She grew very nervous and ill during the bombing of Shanghai. Perhaps she has not told you how nearly she was killed?”

“No!” James cried in a low voice of horror.

Mr. Li nodded. “She was shopping in Wing On’s department store. I had told her she could buy a sable coat. The Russians sent in very good furs to us. She was trying it on when the bomb fell. Luckily she had gone to the stairs, where there was a window, to see the fur by the daylight. Thus she was able to run down the stairs, and escape before the whole building collapsed,” Mr. Li sighed. “Unfortunately she threw off the coat, thinking it would be too heavy. Otherwise she would have kept that, too.”

James did not speak. He continued to look steadfastly at Mr. Li, his face very grave.

Mr. Li went on. “For this reason she is easily frightened, and perhaps will be so all her life. Now maybe Shanghai is better, but we cannot be sure of this. All sorts of disaster still threaten. What if the Communists win? Who can know Heaven’s will? For that reason, even as you say you will not accept our name, I must say that Lili shall not go to China now.”

This was Mr. Li’s ultimatum and James knew it. He knew also that by Chinese reasoning, had he been willing to yield and change his surname, Mr. Li might have made compromise and allowed him to take Lili to China. If one does not give, one cannot expect to receive. He felt the soft implacable net of the reciprocity of Chinese life spread about his feet, and his heart grew firm. He had lived in freedom and he stood alone. He got up, thrust his hands into his pockets, and squared his shoulders. “I shall be sorry to leave my wife here in America to wait alone until China is fit for her to live in. But my work must come first.”

Sweat broke out on Mr. Li’s pale face. “You are too foreign,” he said. A dull ferocity flamed in his face. His lips turned slowly blue. “With a Chinese, family comes first.”

James looked down steadfastly into the upturned face. With understanding and sympathy the younger man looked at the older, and still he could not yield. More than his own life was held in this moment. He had lived for all the years of his adolescence and young manhood in the presence of a dream, and the dream was his country, in peril and need, and himself, devoted to her rescue. He could not give up his dream, for then he would die. And it was worse for a young man to die than an old one. Mr. Li, James told himself hardily, had never done China any good. He was one of those who had lived for his own family. To family how often China had been sacrificed and by how many!

He felt his soul blaze into solitary fire. “Whatever I am, I am first myself,” he told Mr. Li as he turned and left the room and walking down the hall went out of the house.

He could not go home. The night air was soft and the streets were quiet. He glanced at his watch and saw that it was eleven o’clock. There was all night yet to face. He walked slowly, hatless, his hands in his pockets, down the streets and across to the river. There the bridge was, the George Washington Bridge. The name meant something. He had grown up with American heroes. George Washington was more living to him than Confucius. Confucius was a preacher or maybe a teacher, like his father, but George Washington was a doer and the creator of a new nation. The bridge stretched across he enormous span of the river. Mists were rising in soft swirls from the chilled water, and the farther end of the bridge was hidden. It reached from the near shore endlessly into the distance, into the future, and his rich imagination made it a symbol. He would cross the bridge of his dreams, even though he walked alone.

… But in the night, alone in his bed, Lili crept out of his heart and into his mind. He lay in the darkness thinking of her, loving her with all the strength of his young repressed manhood. He had grown up among American boys and girls, seeing their horseplay of sex, and not sharing in it. The knowledge that he was not of their race had been barrier enough, but the delicacy of his soul was the real barrier. He did not want to kiss any girl, to fumble breasts and dance thigh to thigh. It was not sin, but it was not pleasure. More than once a girl had made him feel that she did not mind his being Chinese. It was not enough and he had pretended he did not understand her. He would marry his own kind and they would glory in being Chinese. His pride had been fulfilled in Lili. When she came fresh from China he saw that she was more beautiful than any girl he had ever seen in America. All his restraints tumbled in this night and he determined that he would not give her up. He would go to China and he would take her with him.

When he got up from restless sleep he looked fresh and strong with determination. He bathed; he shaved; he dressed himself carefully in his new gray pin-striped suit and he put on a wine-red tie. When he came to the breakfast table only Mary and Peter were there, and Peter was studying while he ate and did not look up. But Mary cried out at the sight of him. “My, you’re handsome this morning! Did Baba say yes?”

James grinned and sat down to a heaping bowl of oatmeal. “Baba said no, and I’m going over there this morning to take Lili by force.”

“I wish you luck,” Mary said. She was suddenly grave, and she whispered under her breath, “Oh, how I wish you luck!”

He pretended he did not hear her while he poured cream and heaped sugar into the bowl.

For a moment when the door opened into the Li apartment he thought that Lili had been forbidden to see him. Mollie the maid looked distressed. She shut the door softly and glanced up the stairs. “They had some sort of a row here,” she whispered. “When I got in this morning—” She shook her head.

Then Lili herself interrupted them. She came to the head of the stairs, looking exquisite and pale in a blue silk gown and little black slippers, and walked slowly down. Mollie disappeared and James went forward and took Lili in his arms. She crumpled against his shoulder and began to sob softly.

“You made Baba so angry,” she wept.

He was distressed by her weeping, and he led her along in his arms until they were in the small music room off the hall. Here he shut the door and sat down with her on a love seat. “Lili darling, don’t cry,” he coaxed. He pulled out the fresh new handkerchief he had put into his breast pocket and wiped her eyes, holding her face up by his hand under her chin as though she were a child. Her lips were pale this morning and they quivered, and he kissed them. She did not open her eyes and large tears rolled out from under her lashes.

“Was he very angry with you, dear?” he asked tenderly. He drew her head to his shoulder again.

“Baba says I mustn’t marry you,” she sobbed. “He says he will find me another husband.”

James felt his heart knock at his ribs. “He can’t do that, darling — not if you don’t want him to—”

She dabbed at her eyes with her own handkerchief, a small scrap of silk and lace. “You must help me,” she murmured.

He was trembling with fear and love. “I will, darling, of course. But you must be brave, too, Lili. If we stick together, no one can force us apart.”

Her tears rolled again. “Baba can,” she said faintly.

“No, Lili — not even he.”

Despair all but overwhelmed him. She was so yielding, so soft, so trained to obedience. What if he could not put strength into her soul? Ah, but he must! Somehow he must inspire her to see what the bridge meant and when she saw he would be strong enough to walk beside him, wherever it led them.

“Listen to me, darling.” He brushed away the soft curls of her hair from her ear. “You have such pretty ears, Lili!” He kissed the small ear she turned to him. “Think while I talk, dear. Try to understand how I feel. Our people are good — our people are wonderful. China is great. She is not really weak, she is only in distress. All the great strength is simply waiting until we come to her help: She has lived in an old, old world and she needs to be born into the new one. I am a doctor and think naturally in terms of birth — of bringing forth life—”

She was looking at him with wide blank eyes. “But if Baba won’t give us any money how will we live in China?”

He laughed at this. “I will work and make money.”

To his shocked surprise she grew angry at this and she stamped her little foot on his. It did not hurt him, and yet the dig of her heel wounded his heart. “You talk only silly,” she exclaimed. “In China you cannot work. There is no money.”

“The hospital will pay me,” he retorted.

“A little money,” she said scornfully. “How much? Maybe in one month what I paid yesterday for my necklace. Baba is right.”

His arms grew cold around her. “Do you mean you don’t want to marry me?”

She wept again loudly and she threw her arms about his neck. “I do — I do — but please, here, in New York, I like it so much!”

He said gravely, “I must go.”

His arms dropped and she put them back again. “No, you must love me, please!”

In her distraction she was so beautiful, so helpless that he held her again, while his heart broke. So they sat a long time, and he did not know what thoughts went on in her mind.

It was she who spoke first after a while. She wiped her eyes and swallowed her sobs and said in her soft voice, “There is only one way, James. You must go first, without me. When Baba lets me, I will come.”

“You mean — go without being married?”

She nodded. “It is the only way,” she said. “Baba will not make me marry another man right away now if I cry every day. Maybe he won’t die. Then — after you make money — buy a house maybe — or just even rent a nice house—”

He sat staring at her and she did not look at him. She twisted her little wet handkerchief into knots and then untwisted it and spread it on her knee, pulling the lace edge, doing everything, he thought, to avoid his eyes.

“This is what you want me to do, is it, Lili?” he asked at last.

She lifted her eyes to his. “Not what I want—” she whispered.

He was very gentle, very tender. “Then, dear, couldn’t you come with me — run away, maybe?”

She shook her head positively. “I — can’t,” she said in a small sweet voice. “Oh, no!”

“You really are sending me away — alone?”

She began to cry. “It is you who want to go alone — if you stay here everything is all right. I am not troubling — it is you — you—”

He did not try to comfort her. He sat listening; he saw the tears on her cheeks and felt her little hands pressing his. The palms were hot. When her sobbing died and she fell silent he saw her peeping at him from under her wet lashes. She even tried to smile. But he would not allow himself either love or pity.

“Perhaps you are right,” he said. “It is I who want to go — even alone.”

And he rose and went away, refusing at the door, in his one backward look, the appeal of her startled eyes, her hands suddenly outstretched.