The danger, Rhoda pointed out, had been admitted when his marriage made impossible the continuation of that aloof position. He doubted that it could change him so utterly. The thought of the entertainment his wife would afford him in Salem expanded. He regretted that the best, the calling and comments of the women, was necessarily lost to him, but Taou Yuen would repeat a great deal: she, too, had a sly sense of the ridiculous. He hoped that his sister-in-law didn't suppose her helpless; the impenetrable Manchu control gave her a pitiless advantage over any less absolute civilization. In the darkness before sleep the heavy exotic scents in the room oppressed him strangely. He rose early, and quietly dressing went out into the garden: buds on the June roses against the high blank fence on the street were swelling into visible crimson; there were the stamping of horses' feet on the cobbles of the stable inclosure, the heavy breathing and admonitions of the coachman wielding a currycomb. The sunlight streamed down through pale green willow and tall lilac bushes, through the octagonal latticed summerhouse and across the vivid sod to the drawing-room door. Gerrit turned, and entered the farther yard, where his father was inspecting the pear trees. "The _Nautilus_ will need new copper sheathing," Gerrit said: "she's pretty well stripped forward." "Take her around to the Salem Marine Railway at the foot of English Street. A fine ship, Gerrit, with a proper hull. I tell you they'll never improve on the French lines." "She won't go into the wind with a clipper," he admitted; "but I'll sail her on a fair breeze with anything afloat." "If you come to that," his father asserted; "nothing handsomer will ever be seen than an East India-man in the northeast trades with the captain on the quarter-deck in a cocked hat and sword, the shoals of flying fish and albacore skittering about a transom as high and carved and gilded as a church, the royal pennant at the mainmast head. Maybe it would be the _Earl of Balcarras_ with her cannons shining and the midshipmen running about." "Yes," the younger man returned, "and taking in her light sails at sunset, dropping astern like an island. The John Company's ruining British shipping." Jeremy Ammidon muttered one of his favorite pessimistic complaints. "What did you say her name was?" he demanded abruptly. "Taou Yuen." "Taou Yuen Ammidon," the elder pronounced experimentally. "It doesn't sound right, the two won't go together." "But they have," Gerrit declared. He thought impatiently that he must listen to a repetition of Rhoda's assertions. "I don't know much about 'em," Jeremy proceeded. "All I saw, when I was younger, was the little singing-girls playing mora and wailing over their infernal three-stringed fiddles something about the moon and a bowl of water lilies."