“Let her! Have you never seen Julia Townsend with the bit between her teeth? I have. Let her, indeed! I assure you, this is _her_ trip, and she runs no risk of my forgetting it. She asserts herself.” “She always did,” Sên said, with a tender smile on his handsome mouth. “Yes,” his wife agreed, “in her quiet, beautiful way.” “Oh, Julia is quiet still. But there is a sort of wonderful, hushed splendor about her. I believe she has grown an inch since we left Washington.” “In width?” Mrs. Sên asked smoothly. And they both knew that she meant not “width” but “breadth.” The physician shook her head. “But I wish you could see the way she carries her head, the history of all the Townsends in her face, a child’s unspoilt joy in her eyes, and the Star-Spangled Banner waving over her.” “The Star-Spangled Banner?” Sên reminded. “It was her fathers’ flag for nearly a hundred years, Mr. Sên. At home she is a Southern woman first and last. ‘Dixie’ is her anthem, Lincoln and Grant anathema. But here she is just an American woman, proud of every state in the Union.” “Then she _has_ broadened—very much,” Mrs. Sên exclaimed. “No,” Sên objected. “I fancy it’s merely a matter of breeding; ‘company manners’ abroad.” “Precisely,” Dr. Ray agreed, “a sort of traveling cloak that she considers it good taste to wear. But, by the way, Ivy, I did not ‘let’ Miss Julia attend the hula dance. I was not there and did not even know anything of her going until several days later. I was away in Molokai. This is a pleasure jaunt for Julia, but I came for a different purpose. There are several diseases that I have wished for years to see at short range in their native lairs. And when I found that Miss Townsend really was making this trip—the wisest thing she ever had done, I thought at the time, and now I know that it was—I almost instantly decided to link my travel up with Julia’s, and that’s how I come to be here now. Oh! Is that Ruben?” She left the chair that Sên had placed for her where the shaded breeze came in from the garden and took up the photograph in the lacquered frame and studied it minutely, with wise, kind eyes that again told very little of the thoughts behind them. “Very, very charming!” was her comment as she replaced it. “He doesn’t favor my side of the house, does he!” Sên King-lo demanded with a laugh. “Our son is very English.” “Very, and very handsome!” Dr. Ray answered cordially. But to herself the physician added: “And more interesting than handsome. He is your _first-born_: a throw-back, of course, to some blonde ancestor of your wife’s. Baby number two may be as Chinese as baby number one is Saxon. What then?” “What did Miss Julia think of the _hula_ dance?” Sên King-lo asked slyly, as they sat at lunch.