In London she’d said to him: “Make me a Chinese woman!” She had meant it. Would she say it now? Could she mean it now? He thought not. She had liked Hongkong—in spite of its social coldness—as a child likes a ribbon-tied box of sweetmeats, and had nibbled at it much as the child nibbles and likes its chocolates and nougats. But she had not warmed to the realer China as they had passed through it. She had exclaimed at its picture and beauty, laughed at its “quaintness,” but he sensed that it had not touched her, and that not once had she prostrated herself before it. This soul-pilgrimage of his was a picnic to her: gaily colored, well-provisioned, inimitably stage-managed—a delightful kaleidoscopic interlude. Few tricks of custom, manner or words had crept in to her use during her Washington years, and no traits of personality or thought. But the American vocabulary is too apposite, it catches too neatly and firmly, not to have irresistible appeal to all word-quick ears, and no English girl—princess or housemaid—could listen as often and as long as Ivy Gilbert had to voluble Lucille Smiths and Mary Withrows without adopting a syllable or so of a fresh young vernacular so limpid and forceful that it needs no dictionary and grows a classic. A hillside homestead, a small husbandman’s that clung like a rosy fungus on the mountainous steepness, morning-glories and long columbine ropes matting the overtopping lemon-trees that flanked and perfumed it, had lumped King-lo’s throat and quivered his lips as they came into sight of it; Ruby had clapped her hands at it when she saw it, and called it “cute.” A bird on a cypress-tree twittered some sudden domestic anxiety to her absent mate, and Sên King-lo turned to his wife and said in a slow, quiet voice: “Ruby, I am sure that it would make our going through these untraveled places easier and more simple if we wore what Chinese gentlefolk wear—clothes not unlike all those that the Chinese who meet us ever have seen. And it would be a kindness to the old, untraveled grandmother who is waiting for us in Ho-nan. Would you mind? Would you mind too much, dearest?” His wife turned clear laughing eyes to his anxious eyes. “I’d love it,” she told him. Sên King-lo drew a long breath. And his heart blessed her. “But how can we manage?” his wife reminded. “I haven’t spied a shop since we left the railway.” “No,” Sên laughed, “and you’ll spy none again until we return to the railroad, unless a heap of mangos and plantains here and there, with a more than half-naked boy squatted beside them keeping the dragon-flies and the white ants off, with a few coins in a wooden bowl beside him for change, will pass muster for ‘shop.’ And if it would, there’d be no chiffons or picture-hats or peek-a-boo blouses for sale there. But I had thought of that. And I have brought you all you’d need.” “Did Mrs. Yen select my Chinese frocks?” Ruby teased him.