“My knowledge of your customs,” continued Yuan, “enables me to be certain that you will pardon what my countrymen and many of my relations might regard as an immoral absence of ceremony. We run our affairs here on lines which are not precisely national, in any sense.” Wang Li and Hsiao signified approval of this last sentiment. Lord Sombrewater observed to the very old man that he considered the surroundings most elegant. “We are now,” replied Wang Li, “almost at that invisible centre on which the unity of the whole depends”; and he smiled in a way that Ambrose at first tentatively describes as imbecile. The surroundings were indeed elegant. The party had come to the house of the Dragon—not so much a house as a walled village of tasteful, if startling, elegance. It was full, as they afterwards found, of relations; but now, instead of entering the stout red gates, they proceeded, by a harmonious approach, amid scenery with the character of a contrived design on a dessert-plate, to the summer pavilion of Wang Li. “This way,” said Wang, indicating a complicated geometrical harmony of vermilion lines and arcs, perched among trees, a symphony of red balconies and lemon-yellow roof; and they went up into an airy pavilion like a nest of red straws in the pines, sunny, but mysteriously cool. It was on the side of the island where they had landed, and a red balcony hung out over the water. Lychnis seated herself there, on the floor. “The invisible centre of Unity,” observed Wang. And here they noticed, looking down avenues of tree-tops, that the landscape surrounding the island and the Lake had changed, in the sense that the secret of its design, hidden from every other view-point, was strikingly revealed. From everywhere else it baffled, and perhaps a little chafed, the mind. From here it ever variously satisfied and rested one. And the more one looked at the Rock itself, the more one was convinced by a volume or surface, a space of yellow or blue tiling, a green and grinning monster, a bending cypress or sophora. There was no furniture in the room, except a few stools, an affair of ebony and enamel that looked like a smoking table, a musical instrument, or an unknown parlour game, and some jars which Quentin at once recognized as products of the Tang and Ming dynasties—in fact, he identified the signatures, with the applause of old Wang Li. “Though,” the old man strangely observed, “the name which can be written down is not the everlasting name.” “That is, of course, true,” replied Quentin. But he replied absently, for there came in two exquisite and fragile girls, who, after ceremoniously saluting the company, ran like mice, the one to Lychnis, the other to Ruby, and, squatting beside them, began to chatter softly in a shy and welcoming, if incomprehensible, way.