“She did not! Your husband selected and bought them. Will you wear them, if you don’t dislike the feel and look of them when you’ve put them on?” “Of course I will,” Mrs. Sên cried gaily. “And I _promise_ to like them, my venerable lord!” Sên took her face in his hands and brushed her cheek with his lips. Very rarely had he done that. But he had divined long ago that his English wife, little as she liked or even could tolerate kissing, would lack and miss something of love’s legitimate sweetness, if he never paid her the token that every loved wife in the West received. Once in a great while Sên King-lo kissed his wife lightly—her face or her palm—and when he did Ruby Sên always laughed softly. Their lips had never met. And Ruby knew that he never had kissed Ruben. She did not often do it herself—and then only a bath-fresh dimpled hip, or the “sugar-spot” on the back of the baby neck. CHAPTER XLII At daylight Sên Ruby came out from her tent, clad for the first time as Sên ladies had been since the older garbs of China (Japan, imitative in all things, wears them now) had been discarded. She was laughing as she came, delighted with her new masquerade; it made her feel she had dressed for a big charity function of dance and fun at Albert Hall—highly pleased with herself and her fine new quaint clothes. Lo had chosen them well. He had chosen every “prettiest” garment she had had since her marriage. Her hair had been the most bothersome. She’d puffed it out and screwed it up; but it wouldn’t stay stiff, and its slight but established curliness would not “keep put”: it didn’t look right, and it felt horribly wobbly. Never mind, she’d try again after they’d breakfasted, and Lo should get her flowers and dangling buds to stick in it at rakish celestial angles! What fun! She wondered if Lo had brought his camera along. She hoped so! A Chinese man came to meet her, a gentleman far more bravely clad than their servitors—more expensively clad, she thought, than she’d seen any man before; for Sên’s Chinese friends in Hongkong she had seen in Western dress only. How curious his clothes were! She didn’t like them. Chinese women’s clothes were picturesque and comfortable—the best of all clothes for fancy “dress up.” But these Chinese masculine garments that she saw now almost for the first time, she did not like; she thought them fantastic, absurd, unmanly—only fit for a comic opera. Who was he, she wondered, and how did he come to be here in this wild countryside—no dwelling for miles, but the tumbled-down inn with fat pigs and thin hens strolling in and out of it—this richly dressed man in a fur-edged under-coat of turquoise cashmere, a top coat of violet silk, and a skirt of gentian-blue-embroidered bright green? A man in petticoats! But she gave the stranger a courteous glance—Lo could not be far away. Then she smothered a giggle. Did the bedizened and skirted stranger think she was Chinese, she wondered.