“But,” he added stoutly, “every new movement has its scum, and scum always rises to the top.” “Always,” she agreed. “But fulfilled dreams are sorry things often. I sometimes have wondered what George Washington would think of the Chicago Board of Trade when it’s busy, and of the stock-yards.” “But the cause for which he lived and fought and worked was supremely right,” Sên reminded her. “We Americans like to think so,” the woman told him; “but right gets terribly twisted in human hands again and again. And the longer I live, the deeper I probe, the more convinced I grow that ‘causes’ count for strangely little, individual lives for almost everything—everything that really matters.” “And you believe,” Sên King-lo questioned slowly—thinking as he spoke of a Chinese Emperor of whom Dr. Ray never had heard—“that in his record of personal character, Washington left his nation a greater heritage than he did in the victory of the War of Independence and in all the great national foundation he and Hamilton built after Yorktown?” “Just that,” was the quiet reply. “In mental equipment and achievement, I incline to believe that Alexander Hamilton was the greatest genius in history, and certainly the greatest of our country. But George Washington was the greater man—because he was the more entirely _good_.” “Do you hold,” Sên asked with a slight smile, “that all who are good are great?” “I do—the _greatest_.” The five harmless revelers were near them again, for the hillside road had swung round on itself, and the singers were not far away and directly overhead; and the Leicester Square doggerel belched stridently down: “My mother-in-law she’s got a walk like a crab and a tongue like a toad.” “This is not China!” Sên King-lo said, in sudden unleashed passion. “Tell me something—” the woman laid a motherly hand on his hand that lay on her chair, and her eyes that were very kind also were twinkling. “Do you hate and despise the Manchus as much as you did?” “No,” the Chinese man said quickly, “I do not. I am older. And I see what I see.” He smiled back at her as he spoke, but his eyes and his voice were sad. The chair coolies came to a quiet halt, as they often do at some point of special beauty. Elenore Ray gazed about her with a sigh of great content. “I wish you could have seen Hongkong as it was but a few years ago,” Sên King-lo said, as they moved on again. “This is supremely beautiful,” Dr. Ray insisted. “But,” she added musingly, “I begin to suspect that the missionary and the gunboat have a great deal to answer for.” “The Chinese who have taken a wrong turning—if they have—will have a great deal more to answer for,” Sên King-lo said bitterly. CHAPTER XL