To be alone, and to be at leisure rather frequently, was a necessity of his Chinese being. He spoke three European tongues idiomatically, and almost without accent. He spoke English so well that when he did, he thought in English. A very rare and delicate feat that! He could do most things that Englishmen could do, and some of them he did better than many Englishmen could. His Western on-growths were genuine and vigorous. But they all were graftings. No sap of them had permeated backwards into the trunk or core of his nature. In all of them some Chinese sap flowed and tinged. Sên King-lo was thoroughly Chinese—as essentially Chinese as if he never had left the Ho-nan home of his birth. It is in solitude, communing with self, communing more with Nature, that every Chinese takes his spiritual ease, has his spiritual growth, leads his intensest, truest life. It is then that he lives—even more than when he sits with his hand on his mother’s girdle, or his children’s hands on his skirt. Except the most toil-stunted of the working-class, every Chinese must be alone sometimes, or perish. And even the work-driven coolie, who labors and toils and reeks in his sweat almost from dawn to dawn, snatches a soul-breather now and then, alone with his pipe, or a growing flower, a bamboo clump, a rushing river’s bank, a bird on a bough. He must. A Chinese criminal on his way to the indescribable execution ground, will lag a moment to buy a flower, and sniff at it joyously, as he trudges on to his hideous death. Give any Chinese child its choice between a toy and a graceful spray of sweet-scented honeysuckle, invariably it takes the blossoms. And every Chinese—young or old, rich or poor—knows how to be alone, makes solitude a dignity, and gives it charm, and reaps from it—much. Sên King-lo did not go out again that day or evening. When he had lunched—he had called at the florist’s on his way home, and had written his note to Lady Snow at his club, before he went to New Hampshire Avenue—he curled up on a divan with a book—poems that Po-Chii-i had written eleven hundred years ago. He read slowly and steadily—pausing to dream now and then—reading many verses over and over—while the pleasant noises of Washington droned unheeded in at his wide-open window, and he did not lay Po-Chii-i’s old singing aside till Kow Li brought in his tea: true Chinese tea that can be bought in no Western shop. But Sên made no ceremony of his tea-drinking, though it cost him neither cream nor sugar. And he munched a toasted, buttered muffin and two plump éclairs to the last crumb. When Kow Li had cleared away the small tea-service, Sên sat, until it was time to change for dinner, almost without moving in his easy-chair—and thought. It’s a Chinese habit—the breath of the Chinese mind. A Chinese must meditate—or die. Even the babies, and the shrill-tongued babbling women, meditate in China. “Where there is no vision the people perish.”