CHAPTER XXXVIII Ivy Sên laid her hand on her husband’s knee. She was speechless. “It’s true,” he assured her, “though I scarcely believe it myself yet. Dr. Ray in Hongkong or in any other interesting place seems explicable and natural enough, but Miss Julia Townsend is stark impossibility. But here she is.” “You have seen her?” Sên King-lo smiled affectionately and a little grimly, “No. She would not see me. But she is here.” “But, Lo, she couldn’t possibly afford it! All that way—Washington to San Francisco—hotels—the boat! She couldn’t ever do it. You have no idea how poor she was really! She dressed like an old-fashioned queen, and she had literally dozens and dozens of old chests—big ones made of cedar wood—crammed with the costliest things, a hundred years old, some of them, and yards and yards of lace older than that; but I never knew her to buy anything new to wear except gloves and boots and slippers. I don’t think she bought even stockings. She had dozens and dozens of pairs of silk ones—the loveliest silk ones—some thin like cobwebs and some thick as flannel; but she never wore anything else, winter or summer. And besides all those she used to knit others, and so did Dinah and Lucinda—she’d taught them herself. She used to make her own handkerchiefs, hemstitch them and monogram them and all. She almost lived off the place. But she never sold a thing—not so much as one thin old silver spoon, not a tomato, or one of those funny turkey-wings Lysander used for a crumb-brush. She _can’t_ have sold Rosehill or anything in it. She’d as soon have sold her mother’s grave, or her portrait of Robert E. Lee, the Confederate flag that had been in battle with Stonewall Jackson, or Jefferson Davis’ autograph letters to her father. And she never, never has let Dr. Ray pay _for_ her. She wouldn’t do that! She _couldn’t_: not a five-cent street-car fare. How has she found the money? Oh—and she always did so long to travel—above all to see China. She has told me so time after time. And she had never been out of Virginia farther than Washington, in all her life, and never expected to be! Lo,” his wife cried with a broken giggle that sounded full of tears, “she must have sold Lysander and Dinah!” “Have you ever heard her speak,” Sên asked, “of a second or third cousin of hers, Theodore Lee?” “No.” Ivy had not. “Neither have I. But Dr. Ray, who is several years older than Miss Townsend, you know, though she looks much the younger of the two—another case of work keeping us fresher than rust does—Dr. Ray remembers him perfectly. He, too, was quite a few years older than Miss Townsend. He served under General Lee in the Civil War—the youngest officer in the Confederate Army, Dr. Ray says. He lost an arm at Ball’s Bluff and a foot in the Battle of the Wilderness. The war left him penniless, as it did so many, and his father and older brothers were killed.” “It was a holocaust,” Ruby murmured sadly.