They devised many a rout and festive function for foreign Sên Ruby—games, temple picnics, fireworks, peacock-races, kite contests, juggling, wrestling, a play enacted by performers sent for from many miles away—and when the monthly festival came they kept it with even unwonted observance and noise—for Sên Ruby. All that China was they tried to give her, all that China had to show they showed her—because she was a stranger come within their god-guarded gates, and because the lord King-lo had held the cup of hot marriage wine to her maiden lips and drunk it with her. But Ruby thought it all absurd, uncivilized; found it tame and paltry. Miss Julia would have revelled in it, would have found and greeted the soul in it all and threaded out its meaning, learned its histories, loved its pictures. In a slighter way, Ruby would have done so too, had she come upon it merely in privileged travel, had she not been the English wife of a Chinese man—the English mother of a half-Chinese child. But Ruby Sên hated it all. She liked the food; _no one_ could help liking the best food on earth. But she found meal-times abominable, except when Sên King-lo came, which he did whenever he could, to take his rice with her. When he did not she ate alone as often as she could; but even then the women crowded in—there was neither a door nor a key in all the place—to watch her eat, greatly excited at her plying of forks and knives, for Sên King-lo had brought those from Hongkong. Ruby hated it all, and most of all she disliked Sên Ya Tin. But Sên Ya Tin liked Sên Ruby. CHAPTER XLV When King-lo left his wife at the fragrant apartment’s outer entrance, he had gone to the outer gate again and waited there until Sên Ya Tin should summon him. She sent for him soon. She sat immovable on the great carved and inlaid chair on the red-covered daïs at the far end of the great _k’o-tang_, as Sên King-lo came through the opened panel and k’o-towed thrice to the floor. A slave in the outer room closed the panel again, and they two were alone in the great carved room.