In due course the visit was returned by the three Chinese gentlemen, who brought with them several beautiful girls. To entertain them, Lord Sombrewater decreed a picnic; so under an enamel sky, blue to apricot, tables were spread on the lawn between the horns of the grove, and echoes of laughter and sprightly conversation quivered among the delicately shimmering clumps of bamboo. Before them an exceedingly up-to-date lawn-mower was cutting green swathes in a carpet of daisies, like a plough driving through the Milky Way. Willow and elm and plane-tree were mirrored in the glassy lake. Everybody was happy—even Blackwood, who enjoyed the opportunity to reject the opportunity of enjoyment. Old Wang Li, wearing the appearance of an aged villager who has for some time lapsed from mental efficiency, laughed much to himself at nothing; but from time to time there issued from his vacuity some startling observation, and terrifying depths of knowledge were sometimes revealed in a sudden lightning that flickered through the veils of his eyes. Hsiao Chai abandoned himself frankly to the pleasures of the table and occasionally to silent contemplation of the landscape. Yuan engaged in discussion with a certain smiling ardour and charm of youth. But it seemed to Lychnis that he, too, was absentminded part of the time, even when he discussed. His eyes, she said, were not seeing what was around them. There was a rapt, a heart-chilling look in them, she said, as if they pierced through appearances and contemplated realities that might have been frightening for ordinary people to perceive. Ambrose makes it clear that there was nothing impolite in the behaviour of the three guests. They were self-effacing, unself-conscious and simple, but, watching their patrician faces, one felt oneself to be in the company of great gentlemen. It was beyond their power to obscure themselves. All three were in touch, as inconspicuously as might be managed, with some fountain—in communion, secretly, with some tremendous reality. They had become vehicles for it, and it could not be hidden. With Wang it flowered in unexpected and unreasonable laughter; with Hsiao in the frown of creative inspiration; with Yuan in an imperious raptness of gaze. On him also there sat a certain majesty of self-dedication and the foreknowledge of some difficult paradise. As the meal progressed, the system of thought that was to be inferred from the talk of the three Chinese gentlemen seemed to the others more and more curiously upside down. But perhaps not to Quentin. “You are a man to be much admired,” said Hsiao at some free remark of his. “So he is, indeed,” said Lord Sombrewater dryly, “though it has been our experience, on our travels, to hear him referred to less sympathetically.” “That is doubtless because men seek to impose their own ideas of conduct on the rest of mankind,” observed Yuan. “He has discarded purpose,” said Hsiao. “He behaves as his impulses dictate.”