CHAPTER IV

The supper was long. It might have been called a little heavy, if the food had not been so very good. It is not of the South to offer a guest a simple meal. Miss Julia gave her guests more than fried chicken and quivering ice-cold jellies. She gave them scalloped oysters, she gave them corn-oysters (an entirely vegetable but very “filling” dish). She gave them gumbo, and pickles made out of water-melon rinds. She gave them several salads. The oysters were not the sole shellfish, and the sweets—Miss Julia called them all “the dessert,” and Uncle Lysander called them all “puddin’ ”—covered the shining tops of two great priceless sideboards, and their overflow covered one of the long, narrow side-tables. They sat a long time at supper. The oysters had given place to lemon sherbet as Sên King-lo had quoted Confucius, and after the sherbet he turned and talked for a time to his left-hand neighbor, and the English girl chatted to the New Orleans man on her right. But after a course and another, they spoke together again—the merest social decency, since their hostess had put the girl on his right hand.

“It sounded hard—very nearly impossible to learn,” Ivy said, taking up their chat just where Miss Julia had torn it.

“Will you try?” Sên asked lightly. “I’d like to teach you—Chinese.”

“I don’t think you would,” the girl retorted. “I’d not like to teach any one anything. I teach for my living.”

“You!” the Chinese exclaimed—frank and honest admiration in tone and glance. “How young you are to know enough to follow that great career. The greatest of all careers, we think.”

“I don’t know anything at all,” Ivy assured him. “I only teach C-A-T—cat; B-A-T—bat; and wash their faces—my cousins Dick and Blanche—when they’ll hold their faces still long enough. And when they don’t their mother scolds me. I hate it all—and so do they. But I have to—to earn my living.”

Sên King-lo looked more approval than sympathy. Poverty is no social bar-sinister in China, scarcely a handicap in what, until the Manchus fell, was the soundest and truest democracy in human history—not a rabble democracy, but a democracy of dignity, justice, fair play and spiritual equal chance.

“Yes, I should like teaching you Chinese,” he insisted.

“Why ever, why?” the girl demanded discouragingly.

“To pay a debt,” he replied with a smile. “We Chinese must be free of debt on our New Year, and that would just about give me time. And you—I know what you think—you think you’d find my language dull, and that you never would have any use for it. But you may go to China one day, and then you’d find it very useful.”

“I go to China? No such luck! Jersey City perhaps, or even Margate, after we get home again. But I shall never see your country, Mr. Sên—or Calcutta, or Damascus, or Venice, or Madrid. I shall travel in narrow gray ways always. It is written.”

Sên shook his head. “We never can tell,” he reminded her.

“I can,” she said briefly.

He laughed at her again. Then—“Well, but, let me get out of debt then.”

“What is the debt?”

“May I tell you? I wonder. You, I fear, Miss Gilbert, will not like it. It will not seem to you a compliment. But it is one—from me. I’d like to tell you. Shall I?”

The girl nodded—a little indifferently, a little coldly.

“I thought,” Sên answered gravely, “when I saw you there in the live-oak trees this afternoon, that you looked something like a Chinese girl.”

Ivy Gilbert stiffened, her eyes grew icy. Sên King-lo had been right. She did not like it at all.

But Sên King-lo went steadily on. “Forgive me, if you dislike it, resent it so much. To me—it was a sip of cold water in a parching land, on a parching day. Perhaps I was wrong. Probably I was—for I never have seen a Chinese girl.”

Miss Gilbert’s resentment receded before her surprise.

“You never—have seen—a Chinese girl!” she said blankly.

“Not a lady,” he told her. “One sees coolie girls, of course—everywhere. But I have been from home a great many years now. When I was a boy Chinese ladies were not seen outside their own homes—as so many of them are now, I understand. And I had no sisters. My mother was only a girl when she left us, but I do not remember my mother. I was very young, a baby, when she went. I know a Chinese lady here and there: here in Washington, two; several in Europe—but they all are married ladies—and, too, they often seem to me a little un-Chinese, because they wear English clothes and eat with a fork—as, for the very same reasons, I, no doubt, seem not quite Chinese to them.”

Miss Gilbert glanced down involuntarily at his hand—he was lifting food with his fork, quite accustomedly—and she looked up again, a question she would not have asked for worlds in her eyes.

“Yes, indeed,” Sên told her, “I can use chop-sticks. I can eat ice-cream even with chop-sticks—if it is not very feeble—melted. But I like your forks much better.”

The girl colored slightly in her surprise. She had yet to learn that many Chinese can read thoughts almost as easily as they can read printed words.

“I never have known a Chinese woman at all well. Miss Townsend is my closest woman friend. Odd that, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” she agreed.

“And I never have seen a Chinese girl of our own caste.”

Did he mean his own caste, or his and hers? Again the man had startled her. It was a rather weird thought that in his opinion (in her opinion it was an impossibility) she and any Chinese might have caste in common—caste or any other social bond.

“I knew you were English before I saw you, because I had heard your voice first. But when I looked to where the voice had sounded, it seemed to me—just for a moment—that China was not the long way off that it has been for years. You were wearing some material the color of much of our rarest jade. Almost all the ladies here were wearing white. It often looks to Chinese eyes as if every woman in the West went into mourning as soon as summer comes. That always jars a little. We love summer—the sun, the flowers, the heat, all that it stands for, and promises. Even our terrible Yellow Sorrow laughs and is happy when summer comes.”

Ivy Gilbert had no idea what he meant. She never had heard of the Yangtse-kiang. She scarcely knew whether China had a river. But Sên King-lo, though he had had considerable gage of how dense the West’s ken of the East was, did not suspect her ignorance. Perhaps—because of the jade-green dress, Sên King-lo was forgetting himself a little. Even a Chinese man does that—under certain provocation—at twenty-seven.

“White is our ‘black’ you know.”

Yes, she had heard that—though it isn’t quite true; for the hemp garments of Chinese bereavement are nearer a dun drab than they are to the white that snow and lilies wear.

“Your gown struck a note of Chinese color, those scarlet peppers”—she was wearing them still—“struck another: their vividness and their dangling. Every Chinese woman wears something that dangles.”

“How do you know?” she interrupted him. “How do you know what Chinese girls wear?”

Sên King-lo laughed—his eyes even more than his mouth. Chinese gentlepeople have the most beautiful teeth in the world.

“No, no,” he protested. “That was well-bowled. But you have not caught me out, leg before wicket. I have seen pictures of Chinese girls, Miss Gilbert. And I can read Chinese. Stickpins and girdle ornaments dangle in half the pages of Chinese romances. You did remind me of my home—for the moment. Even the fern you were fanning yourself with added to the impression. You fanned yourself a little as we do—with a Chinese turn of your wrist. I am in your debt.”

The girl made no reply beyond a chill, perfunctory smile. She was slightly amused, still more slightly interested, and not a little offended.

She turned and, finding a chance, spoke with the man on her other side.

After that the table talk became more general—as Miss Julia best liked it.

Much of it was talk well over Ivy Gilbert’s head. She had heard of the League of Nations and she knew—superficially—what Bolshevism was, but she never had heard of Lombroso, or of the cave-temples of Ajanta. She did not know who Akbar and Barbur were. She did not know who “John Doe” was. Nor what Pragmatism meant. She never had heard of Knut Hamsun. She listened, not greatly interested, and she contributed nothing. And she was vexed that the only two men of any special note or maturity there directed a great deal of their conversation to Mr. Sên King-lo, and that the part he bore in all that was said seemed not only the least mean and quite the ablest, most interesting, but also the quickest and easiest. Certainly his use of English was the supplest there. A Chinese turn of her wrist indeed! She wondered if the odd, tan-colored creature was able to think in English? He spoke the language—hers and Shakespeare’s—almost as if he must think in it. And he must have been speaking it for a good many years—his r’s were not l’s. There was more a something Eastern in the timbre of his voice than anything distinctly a foreigner’s in his accent. He spoke her own tongue more as she did, more as she’d usually heard it at home—though perhaps not invariably in Balham—as she always heard it in Washington, or heard it at Harvard or under the elms of New Haven, when she’d been there last summer for a few vivid international days.

There was no dancing after supper. There was chit-chat and music—out on the porch. They sang “Annie Laurie” and “Oft in the Stilly Night” and a fairly long program dictated by Miss Julia. Then she commanded Mr. Sên to play—and to sing that little song she’d liked so much the other night. But he had not brought an instrument—neither a lute nor his guitar. Ivy Gilbert’s lip curled a little. So, he was a troubadour, too! He ought to have worn his lute, or a gilded, inlaid harp, to the garden party, slung over his shoulder on a ribbon. She wondered if he could use his fists! Those delicate, graceful hands did not look as if they’d be much good at fisticuffs!

“You are not to come without it again,” Miss Julia told him.

“When I call on Sunday mornings, or meet you at the Wardman Park Inn for lunch, Madame?”

“You know what and when I mean,” Miss Julia told him severely. “Go and get a banjo—or something.”

Sên King-lo rose instantly. “ ‘In all my best I shall obey you, Madame,’ ” he said with a low and humble bow, and went off towards the “quarters” beyond the kitchen-garden.

Did Miss Townsend lunch with a Chinese at the Wardman? Ivy wondered. Did many women do so?

How—how extraordinary! But it was rather sporting of Miss Julia.

Sên came back presently from beyond the tomatoes and the cucumbers, walking briskly, tuning a banjo as he came.

He sat down on the veranda steps, at Miss Julia’s feet, and began thrumming an old camp-meeting song. Ivy Gilbert thought the words preposterous, but the lilt was very pretty—and Miss Julia beat time softly on the porch railing with her tortoise-shell lorgnette—and Miss Julia joined in the chorus. Every one did—except Ivy Gilbert. He sang “My Old Dutch”—Ivy knew that; and he sang a darky love-song. How could he do that? Then he started Harry Lauder’s London latest. And the English girl, who never had heard of China’s Yellow Sorrow or of Omi or of Marco Polo, had heard of Harry Lauder.

Miss Julia hinted deftly at “goodnight” with, “And now the best for the last. One of your own!”

Sên King-lo made the borrowed banjo wail like a soft wind that grieved and trembled in the moonlight—and then drifted words into the accompaniment that the girl fancied he was improvising.

he sang.

And then the good-bys were said. And Miss Julia and Ivy Gilbert were left alone.

Sên King-lo lingered over Miss Townsend’s hand. Ivy feared he was going to offer to touch hers. But he did not, he merely bowed, and without speaking.

The girl was grateful for that.

She stood a moment at her window, looking at the roses in the moonlight, before she drew her curtain and began to undress. And, as she stood looking out across the garden, she drew the scarlet peppers from her bodice and threw them, testily, out into the night.

CHAPTER V

As they sat at breakfast—Miss Julia and the girl—Lysander brought his mistress, and proffered on a great silver salver, a florist’s ribbon-bound box. There were carnations in it, great dusky, imperial, wine-deep carnations, ruby red ones, flaming scarlet, blush pink and lemon, and a handful just the color of tomatoes. Julia Townsend gathered them up in her hands with a murmur of delight—as many of them as her hands could hold, and hung her pleased face over their sumptuous fragrance.

“I never give a friend’s gift away—or any part of it,” she said, “or you should have half of these. They belong to youth,” she added a little sadly—but quite bravely. “But you shall smell them.”

The girl could not help smelling them. They scented the room.

Miss Julia took the visiting-card from the box as if she knew whose it would prove, read it with a smile, and passed it—as if proud of it—to Ivy.

Beneath his engraved name, on the bit of social pasteboard, as correct in Western convention as his coat, Sên King-lo had written, “With gratitude for rice, and always to you, Madame, with my homage.”

Ivy Gilbert looked at the card, passed it back—scarcely touching it—looked at the flowers, then looked at Miss Julia, trying to think of some pleasant and satisfactory comment to make—she thought one was expected—failed, and so “Thank you,” lamely, was all she said.

Miss Townsend was simple in the best and finest sense of simplicity, but what she knew she knew rather thoroughly, and she was not inexperienced in girls.

“Why do you not like Mr. Sên?” she asked.

“I’ve not said so.” Ivy flushed a little.

“I say so,” Miss Julia retorted with gentle decision.

“But,” the girl demurred, “I’m not sure that I don’t.”

“You are not sure that you do,” the woman insinuated with a smile.

“That is perfectly true,” the girl owned. “I don’t know whether I like or dislike him. I hope I did neither. I’d not care to believe that I either liked or disliked him.”

“Why not, girl?”

“I’m not sure I can explain. I—yes, that is it; I resented him.”

“Resented him?” Miss Julia spoke warmly. “Why?”

“His color, I suppose,” Ivy said hesitatingly. “For I can’t think of any other reason. I don’t feel as you do, Miss Townsend, about colored people and all that—we don’t in England. But still—I don’t quite take it lying down, I suppose, when I see one of them, not only evidently thinking himself as good as we are, but assuming that we think so too.”

“Sên King-lo is very much better than most of us,” Miss Townsend said quietly, “and far too intelligent not to know it.”

The girl stared in astonishment. She was wordless.

The woman laughed. “Don’t be a goose, Ivy,” she advised good-humoredly. “And don’t talk about ‘colored people’ as if Mr. Sên were one. He is nothing of the sort.”

“He is blacker than I am,” Ivy laughed.

“Well, how would you like to be called a ‘colored person’?”

“But I’m not. And calling me so wouldn’t make me one.”

“And he is not one. And calling him so doesn’t make him one.”

“He’s Chinese,” Ivy persisted.

“Who said he wasn’t?” Miss Julia persisted too. “And—if I get at your meaning, and I think I do—you think it inappropriate that you should associate with a Chinese gentleman on just the same terms as with a French or Spanish gentleman. Isn’t that it?”

“There is a difference,” Ivy urged.

“Humph!” said Miss Julia.

“I don’t think Uncle Lysander liked waiting on him,” the girl ventured.

“Indeed?” Miss Townsend spoke crisply. “I give my blacks their orders. I am not concerned with their race-prejudices, or disturbed by their likes or dislikes—so long as they do not display them. And it never has occurred to me to consult Lysander as to what guests I should or should not receive.”

“Don’t be angry with me, please,” Ivy pleaded. “I only said what I did because you asked me.”

“That’s true,” the hostess admitted promptly. “And I daresay you are not the only one that is surprised and not too approving of my friendship with Sên King-lo.”

“Oh, I hope I didn’t even hint that!”

“You didn’t mean to, I’m sure. But you felt it. And,” she added dryly, “you did rather hint that my Chinese guest was not good enough for Uncle Lysander.”

“Oh—” Ivy began—and broke off lamely with, “I wish I’d held my tongue.”

“I don’t,” Miss Julia told her. “We may as well get it clear. There are two parts to it: the very different attitude of my mind to the darkies and to Asiatics, and my personal regard for Mr. Sên individually. I love my negroes, just as I love my dogs and all horses. In a certain way, or rather in certain ways, I respect them—sometimes, some of them. I respect their loyalty, when they are loyal. (Mine have to be, or go.) But the best of them are a cross between babies and useful domestic animals. The negro race has no past, and will have no future. It has certain knacks of mind, but no intellect. It is of peasant breed through and through. Lysander and Peter probably would be eating each other, or breakfasting off Dinah this very day, and doing it stark naked somewhere in Africa, if their ancestors had not been captured, carried over here, and sold as slaves to my ancestors. The nigger rose to his highest place and development under the rule of the Southern master. What’s going to happen to him now? One of three things. Either he’ll die out, starved to death by his own laziness and exterminated by consumption; or he’ll deteriorate into a despised and despicable, contemptibly employed pariah, crushed and wretched, his hand against every one of us, and most of all against himself; or he’ll ruin this country and exterminate us. He can teach us nothing and the North-fangled teaching is going to corrupt him and corrupt him very far and very fast. It isn’t a matter of skin, I tell you, it isn’t a matter of color; it is a matter of character, of mind and of social fitness—the difference between the negroes and the Asian. Asia can teach us a great deal. And some of us are just beginning to suspect it. Sên King-lo’s ancestors were gentlemen, and were scholars and statesmen and artists when yours and mine were living in a tadpole state of human existence. We have risen—you and I. The darkies can’t rise—not an inch higher than they have. We never—if we’ve got a sane hair on our head—can treat the negroes as our equals; for the reason that they never by any possibility or miracle can rise to or approach equality. They can go down, in my opinion they will—but they never, never can go up—any farther. Many Asiatic peoples had ‘gone up’ very far when we were still wallowing. Not many of us Americans know this—or are willing to realize it. I happen to. They are different from us. They are not inferior. Now, about Mr. Sên—individually about him. When he first came here the present running after yellow officials had not begun. It is only a smart-set fad—like the tango and indecently short skirts, or a dash of rum in tea—to spoil it—we had that a few years ago, or eating asparagus with your fingers. It’s only froth—and not the creditable thing it looks. No one ran after him then, or asked him to dinner. I had to. To be fair, I didn’t like it. But I was in debt to him, and, of course, I had to pay.”

Ivy was interested now—and looked it.

“His grandfather saved my great-uncle Julian’s life. Yes!”—for the girl’s amazement showed her almost incredulous. “In Pekin. What my great-uncle was doing there I don’t remember—something about some sort of concession somebody wanted about something or other—opium, I daresay, or tea, or tea-pots, or ivories, or hemp—anyway, he was there. And you English were there too—and not popular—and the Chinese didn’t see any more difference between a nice simon pure American like my great-uncle Julian and an Englishman than some people can see between a woolly negro house-servant and a Chinese gentleman. Two of the English got themselves into a bad scrape of some sort; the Chinese locked them up in a cage, and fed them through the bars, and didn’t feed them particularly well or particularly much—two Englishmen named—let me see—Lord? No—Lock—Lock and Parkes—yes, that’s it; at least I think one was named Lock, and I know the other man’s name was Parkes. Well, the Chinese were going to do the same to my great-uncle, and to cut off his head into the bargain. I’m sure I don’t remember why, if I ever heard. And they very nearly did. But a Chinese man—you needn’t ask me why, for I’ve no idea, helped Uncle Julian to escape, and sent him home to Virginia. His name was Sên—Sên Ch’ang Tso, and his memory has been kept green by all of us—we Townsends—ever since. And when I saw in the Post that a Mr. Sên had come over as a secretary or something to the Chinese Minister here I went and called. They were not going to let me in—but they did. The boy—Sên King-lo, was surprised at my visit. Well, that didn’t matter. He was polite—they always are—and I sat down and asked him if he had had a relative in Pekin in 1860, a relative named Sên Ch’ang Tso, and he said, ‘Yes, my grandfather.’ And then I told him about my great-uncle Julian. He never had heard of that. But he said he was pleased to have met me—and I think he was—afterwards. And we have been friends ever since. I asked him here, because I felt I ought to—but now I ask him because I want him. He had no other friend—outside of his own people—in Washington then. Now he has more than he can do with. But he never forgets me. He never lets many days go by without showing me one of the small, pretty attentions that mean so much to women, and mean most to old, unmarried women who can’t be said to get the lion’s share of carnations and chocolate creams.” She sniffed at the flowers again, and nodded at Ivy across them.

“Thank you—for telling me,” the girl said.

“Well, what is it? You are thinking something you don’t like to say. Out with it, my dear.”

“I was wondering,” Ivy said slowly, “that Mr. Sên cared to sing darky songs, and wondering if he quite liked borrowing one of the negroes’ banjos, and playing on it?”

Miss Julia laughed. “That color question again! Don’t let how that affects Sên King-lo trouble you. It does not affect him at all. He may or may not realize that a good many people class him and all his countrymen with the blacks—probably he does. He can see through a church door when it is open. But, if he does, he leaves it for what it is worth. Sên King-lo knows what he is.”

CHAPTER VI

And Ivy tried to look convinced, and to do it cordially. She loved Miss Julia. She was not convinced, not even greatly impressed or interested. The ramifications of the color-question—if it had any, that seemed to obsess so much of worried American thought, and monopolized so much of American conversation, did not grip her. The color-question shadowed Europe but lightly as yet. And Ivy Gilbert was self-centered, and did not have a profound mind. At home she rarely read the Times, and never the Spectator, Outlook or National Review. And what if, some time long ago, in the far-off outlandish place where cherry-stones grow outside of the fruit, and even the King—or was he the Emperor?—or the Lama?—dined off puppies and mice, and drowned his wives in hot oil if they displeased him, a man named Sên had saved the life of one of the Townsends?—if he had, how did it credit the Sên now in Washington? She could not see that it, even if true, put the Chinese man she’d met at Miss Julia’s on her own plane, or on one at all approaching it—or that anything ever could or should. But she loved Miss Julia and would not hurt or vex her for a great deal. So she did her girlish best to look what she did not feel.

And Miss Julia appreciated it. She was not deceived. But she was pleased at the girl’s loyal docility and deference. And what did it matter what the raw, not-much-traveled young thing thought of Sên King-lo? Nothing at all. So Miss Julia smiled affectionately at her girl-guest, as she pushed back her chair and said,

“And now, child, if you won’t have just one more pop-over, we’ll go and cut the roses—after I’ve put these beauties in water.”

And two hours later, Ivy Gilbert, her arms full of roses, went back to Washington and her nursery-governess duties in her cousin’s—Lady Snow’s—house in Massachusetts Avenue, and Miss Julia was left alone to put all the fat, heavily-embossed silver, the pearl-handled knives, the precious heirloom glass, and the very thin china back in their wrappings of chamois-leather and lavender.

It was Friday. The garden party at Rosehill had been on a Thursday. On Saturday morning a small thing befell that had not often happened to Ivy Gilbert, and very rarely indeed since she had left England: a man sent her flowers.

Ivy was surprised when a maid brought her the box, dubious even—and she scrutinized the name and address very carefully. But there was no loophole of blunder in either. So she untied the silk cord, and lifted the lid. Violets smiled up at her shyly and fragrantly—and whoever had sent them had had the taste to send them with an abundance of their own leaves—and nothing else—but perhaps that good taste had been the florist’s.

She picked up the card with them and looked at it with curiosity. Then dropped it back with a little sound of disappointment.

The card was Mr. Sên King-lo’s. But nothing was written on it—nothing beyond the engraved name.

She was not a little incensed. She felt that he had taken an unpardonable liberty. It would be taking too much notice of him and of his insufferable Chinese cheek, to send the violets back. But she would not have them!

She’d give them to Emily, the under-housemaid. It was Emily’s night out, and no doubt Emily’d be well-pleased to wear them. Then—she thought of Miss Julia. Miss Julia valued the man, had said she was fond of him! And she had met him at Miss Julia’s. No, she mustn’t do that, much as she’d like to. And they were beautiful violets—dewy and sweet. Well, they should have a drink for their own sake—the fault wasn’t theirs—and for dear, foolish Miss Julia’s.

The card and the tissue paper went into the wastepaper basket, but the presumptuously sent violets went into a bowl of fresh water. And Ivy carried it up to her own room and left them there, for fear one of her cousins should ask her who sent them. She’d have been ashamed to tell. So the violets were more or less tucked away in an inconspicuous corner of the English girl’s room. And before lunch she had forgotten all about them in the rush of the day. Saturday always was her busiest day. Lady Snow made shopping rounds on Saturday mornings, and social rounds on Saturday afternoons, almost invariably, and household responsibilities devolved on Ivy, in her cousin’s absence, that the British matron never deputed when she was at home.

But today Ivy had visitors who would not be denied, but refused to be barred out by the man-servant’s “Not at home”—and when Ivy couldn’t come down, insisted upon going up to her. And Ivy alone in the schoolroom at the top of the house was almost as little pleased to see them as she had been to see “that Chinaman’s” violets—but not so surprised. Lucille Smith had a habit of “popping in” at unusual and inconvenient hours, and never on earth had been known to take “No” for an answer. And Molly Wheeler had “come along” with the Judge’s daughter.

“I’ll have to go on working,” Ivy told them. “I can’t go to church in the morning unless I get this blouse finished. I’ve nothing else I can possibly wear with my new coat and skirt—and no other gown fit to wear. And I must go to church with the children. It’s one of my charming duties. They wriggle and whisper all the time. So I must get this done, and it will take me all my time. So don’t expect me to entertain you.”

“That’s all right,” Miss Smith assured her. “Where are the treasures!” she asked anxiously, looking about the small room apprehensively.

It was evident that they had not come to call upon either Dick or Blanche, and it was quite as evident that both the girls were greatly excited. Perhaps Lucille was going to marry George Hitchock after all, then.

“Gone to dancing-school with Justine, thank fortune,” their governess answered, “or I never should get this finished. I’ll have to sew half the night as it is. Thank goodness they won’t be back for another hour or more.”

“Thank the Lord!” Lucille Smith cried fervently. “Ivy! Is it true?”

“True? What?”

“Did Sên King-lo send you flowers?”

Miss Gilbert in her surprise nearly let the new delicate blouse fall upon the schoolroom floor.

“Who ever told you that?” she demanded.

“Nobody. I heard him myself, heard him order them. I’m almost sure it was your name he gave, you he told the man to send them to. Tom went to talk up Belle’s wedding bouquet—she’s got such a temper, you know, there’d be the devil to pay—right in the church, perhaps—if it wasn’t just exactly as she told Tom to have it made, so he didn’t dare order it over the ’phone or by writing, and he was no end embarrassed, plumb afraid to go alone—so I had to tag along. Well, when Sên King-lo came in, I was mighty glad I had. Say! he knew what he wanted, just how many, just which sort, and about the leaves, and the box; he picked out the box, just a plain white one, ‘nothing fancy,’ and no ribbons. I hoped he’d stop and talk a bit, but he only took off his hat and kept it off—My! isn’t his hair smooth—and Tom was so fidgety I couldn’t make the running myself. If I hadn’t held on to his coat, he’d have bolted and cut out of the store. But I did hear Sên King-lo order violets, and I’ll believe to my dying day it was you he told the clerk to send them to. Was it? Ivy Gilbert, did Sên King-lo send you violets? Tell us this minute!”

“Is that what brought you here?” asked Ivy.

“You bet it is!” Lucille exclaimed. And Molly added, “And you can bet big!”

“Did he?” Lucille begged. “Ivy, did he?”

“Yes, he did,” Ivy said chillingly.

“Oh!” Lucille cried. “Ivy—how perfectly scrumptious! How heavenly!”

And the Senator’s daughter said chokingly, “You lucky, lucky girl!”

Ivy regarded them gravely. “I think it rather an insult,” she said smoothly.

“Oh!” both the other girls cried. And Lucille Smith added, “Say, Ivy Gilbert, are you insane? Sên King-lo never sent flowers before! Violets from Sên King-lo! And you—” words failed.

Miss Gilbert smiled superiorly. “You are very much mistaken, Lucille. He often sends flowers to Miss Julia. He sent her a huge armful yesterday morning. I was there when they came. Mine are just a handful.”

“Miss Julia!” Molly retorted. “Of course he does. We knew that. She always tells you when she has flowers he’s sent in the parlor, and everybody knows he adores Miss Julia, and that she thinks no end of him. Why, she discovered him, and mothered him too, a year or more before he became the rage. Miss Julia don’t count. And I think he often sends flowers to married women after he’s been to dinner or a dance—he is no end polite—Sên King-lo. But he never, never sent any to a girl before! Ivy, you are the very first. My—don’t I wish it was me!”

“There isn’t a girl in Washington who wouldn’t,” Lucille added.

Ivy Gilbert snapped off her thread, and laid down her needlework for a moment. “Lucille,” she asked quietly, “would you marry Mr. Sên?”

Lucille giggled. “I’d like to—just to see Papa’s face. But I don’t say as I would, not exactly. You don’t have to marry every man that sends you marrons glacés, or orchids, or I’d have as many husbands as the late Brigham Young had wives.”

“Lucille Smith!” Miss Wheeler assumed a shockedness she did not feel.

“Well—isn’t it true? And wouldn’t most of us!”

“Yes, I suppose it is,” Molly owned, dimpling happily.

“I don’t say I would,” Lucille repeated. “But goodness only knows what I’d say if he asked me. My, what a lark it would be! But I needn’t worry. He won’t ask me. He won’t ask any of us. But, Ivy Gilbert, I don’t believe but half the girls in Washington would jump at the chance.”

Ivy’s lip curled. She took up her blouse and re-threaded her needle.

“I don’t believe I would really. But it would be supremely exciting to have him ask me. And I’d give my eyes to have a flirtation with Sên King-lo. No girl ever has—and a good few dozens have tried.”

Ivy sewed on in silence.

“Show them to us, do, Ivy,” Molly broke in.

“Too much fag,” the girl replied. “I haven’t the time.”

“Was there a note with them?” Lucille Smith questioned.

“There was not.”

“Ivy,” Molly begged, “tell us. . . . What did you say when you thanked him?”

“I have not seen him.”

“But when you wrote?”

“I haven’t.”

“Oh! Oh!” Molly bleated it.

“Ivy Gilbert!” Lucille’s was a cry of reproach.

“You must!” one of them told her.

“You awful goose!” the other told her.

“Did he send his card?”

Ivy nodded.

“Let’s see it!” Miss Smith demanded.

“I haven’t got it.”

“Whatever!”

“Ivy!”

“Why should I keep it? I didn’t want it. And our wastepaper baskets are emptied twice a day. It’s one of the things Emma’s most particular about.”

Lucille gasped. Molly Wheeler looked on the point of weeping. “Weren’t you glad to get the violets?” she wailed.

“I certainly was not. I was displeased,” the sewing girl said coldly.

“You idiot! Come on, Molly; she’s hopeless. Let’s get on to Kate’s.”

“Yes, do,” Ivy said cheerfully. “I must get this done. And I simply can’t while you girls chatter, and sigh, and ‘Oh!’ and ‘Ah!’ ”

“You might let us see them first,” was Lucille’s final shot.

Ivy made no reply. She sewed on quietly and busily when they really had gone. But on the whole she felt less affronted by Mr. Sên than she had. And she wondered if she ought not, in common politeness, to send him a line of thanks—formal thanks.

The girls had envied her: that was clear.

If further acquaintance was Sên King-lo’s desire, Miss Smith and Miss Wheeler had done more to accomplish his wish than Miss Julia had.

CHAPTER VII

If Sên King-lo had such a desire, he was scarcely aware of it. And a Chinese usually knows perfectly what all his own wishes are. There is very little that floats; most is securely fixed in Chinese mentality and character.

He had liked her at Miss Julia’s supper table, and on the porch after supper, better than she had liked him, but she had interested him less than he had interested her. In the garden, under the live-oaks she had arrested his attention intensely. At the supper table probing, not impertinently or even intentionally, but just as we must probe any stranger with whom we speak for the first time—unless character and personality mean nothing to us, and to Sên King-lo they meant a very great deal—he had found little to hold him; nothing but pleasant girlhood and a touch of bitterness that, while he pitied it, did not attract him. In the garden she had charmed him and simply and solely because, as he had told her, she for a moment had looked to him less un-Chinese, or, to coin a fitter word, less dis-Chinese than any not Oriental woman had before, or than he’d have credited that any could. She, the tilt of her head, her coloring, a look in her eyes, the movement of her fine, blue-veined wrist, the jade-green of her straight-cut gown, the scarlet peppers dangling charm-like at her breast, the fan-used fern-frond, had made a sudden picture of home to him. And Sên King-lo was homesick—sometimes very homesick. And if she had looked to him a little Chinese-like, and he had been grateful to her for that, what he’d by chance heard her say had quickened his admiration as no mere beauty of person could have done—and Sên King-lo worshiped beauty. In that he was true to type. Chinese religions are somewhat a farce, a convention and not a force, but the Chinese strictly speaking religionless, are intensely and vitally religious, and they worship but two gods: ancestors and beauty. The technical gods of China are among its servants—hewers of wood, drawers of water—engaged often by the year or the day, treated and paid accordingly, punished when recalcitrant or slothful, dismissed without a character if too unsatisfactory. All of which the gods take lying down, and far more like unto lambs than Chinese servants do, who often make the welkin ring with their wailing and cursing.

When Ivy Gilbert had inveighed against kissing and being kissed she had spoken straight to the soul (and the taste) of China, and the Chinese soul of Sên King-lo had sprung to her in response. Sên King-lo was no yellow-tinted “plaster saint.” But our Western habit of kissing, meaninglessly and otherwise, revolted him as much today as it had when his astonishment and disgust first had observed it. And he had avoided it—always. Girls, and here and there a wife, here in America, across the Atlantic, in several capitals—well, Sên King-lo knew that he might have kissed, if he would. A girl who stayed away from a presumably pleasant gaiety rather than receive a young hostess’ friendly kiss had intrigued him. And that charm and approval held when he had found less than he’d hoped in the girl at supper, and still held. But if she had interested him less than he her, she had not altogether failed to interest him, and he had liked her.

He had sent his violets (they’d cost a fraction of what Miss Julia’s carnations had) with far less thought of further acquaintance than of gratitude for the picture she’d made—she and her gown and peppers and fan of fern. For that and for one other reason. Because of the picture she’d made, and because her name was “Ivy.” He’d heard her called so—and it had made an oddly strong appeal to him—a Chinese appeal.

He had bought and sent the little offering of fragrant flowers not from any light or sudden impulse—Sên King-lo very rarely acted on impulse—but in quiet acknowledgment of a debt; and because her name was Ivy! Not very usual reasons for the sending of flowers—but then Sên King-lo was Chinese.

In one thing Lucille had gossiped truly enough. Sên King-lo never had sent flowers to a girl before. And he had done it this time without either intention or any flicker of warmth. Just possibly the call of her youth to his had sent its young, quick message through more than he realized. Twenty-seven is not omniscient—not even twenty-seven of the quicker sense and Chinese born. He had known no “girls” of his own race. The many he’d known of the American and, but more slightly, half a dozen European races, had sent no message along the nerve wires of his personality, partly because they had both looked and seemed to him so utterly foreign, and because they had not seemed to him altogether girl-like. Miss Gilbert had had a hint of familiar look to him; she had said a Chinese-like thing—the first thing he’d heard her say—and if afterwards, she had not whipped his mind into foam and excitement, he had thought her maidenly.

He had thought and sensed her maidenly. He was twenty-seven. And he was a man.

And perhaps for this—certainly for something else—his face warmed when the English girl’s note of thanks—the merest, meaningless line—came to him on Monday.

Before he read it he saw how much he liked this girl’s writing. No other people take handwriting so seriously as the Chinese do—put so much into it, read so much from it. This was round, clear writing, individual and decided; nothing Spencerian about it—as refreshing as a cup of cold well-water on a very hot day—in a country where almost all handwritings were disconcertingly, monotonously alike. It was an attractive handwriting, and he thought it looked like its writer. It pleased him. But it was something else that brought a soft flush to his face, a new look in his eyes.

She had signed it in full: