“And there, my dear Griggsby Doane, while still suffering from your wound, you learned that those in Monsieur Pourmont's compound were cut off from communication with their nationals at Peking. You at once volunteered to go again, alone, through the Looker lines to the railhead with messages, and successfully did so.... Do you wonder, my dear young friend, that knowing this, and more, of your honesty and personal force from my one-time assistant, Pao Ting Chuan, of T'ainan-fu, I pressed strongly on the gentlemen from New York who represented the Asiatic Company my desire that they secure you to act as their resident director? And do you wonder that I regretted your refusal so to act?” This statement came to Doane as a surprise. “They offered me a position, yes,” he said, pondering on the inexplicable ways in which the currents of life meet and cross. “But they told me nothing of your interest.” His excellency smiled. “It might have raised your price. They would think of that. The sharpest trading, Griggsby Doane, is not done in the Orient. That I have learned from a long lifetime of struggling against the aggressions of white nations. During the discussion of the concerted loan to China--you recall it?--they talked of lending us a hundred million dollars, gold. To read your New York papers was to think that we were almost to be given the money. It seemed really a philanthropy. But do you know what their left hands were doing while their right hands waved in a fine gesture of aid to the struggling China? These were the terms. First they subtracted a large commission--that for the bankers themselves; then, what with stipulations of various sorts as to the uses to which the money--or the credit--was to be put, mostly in purchases of railway and war material from their own hongs at further huge profits to themselves, they whittled it down until the actual money to be expended under our own direction, amounted to about fifteen millions. And with that went immense new concessions--really the signing away of an empire--and new foreign supervision of our internal affairs. For all these privileges we were to pay an annual interest and later repay the full amount, one hundred millions. It was quite unbearable.” He sighed. “But what is poor old China to do?” Doane nodded gravely. “I felt all that--the sort of thing--when I talked with representatives of the Asiatic Company. Not that I blamed them, of course. It is a point of view much larger than any of them; they are but part of a great tendency. I couldn't go into it.” “Why not?” The viceroy's keen eyes dropped to the slightly faded blue uniform, then rested again on the strong face.