Though he was dining alone in his own sitting-room, Sên dressed for dinner as scrupulously as if he’d been an English subaltern alone in a remote dâk bungalow about to dine off half-roasted but wholly grown goat and undergrown plantains, washed down by criminal and luke-warm beer. There was not a little of the English gentleman in Sên King-lo, not a few English characteristics, habits and traits that in no way clashed with Chinese—or that were Chinese as well. And there were a number of Western superficialities that he preferred to their Eastern substitutes. He not only liked silver forks better than he did ivory chop-sticks, and glass finger-bowls better than a steaming wet towel, and preferred mattress, blankets, sheets and soft pillows, to a mat and a hard cylinder pillow—though in England, and when well dog-tired after a hunting day, he more than once had sat up all night, in protest against the feather-bed his hostess had assigned to him—but he had grown so accustomed to English clothes that he no longer realized how much more comfortable, and in most ways preferable, were the men’s garments of old Pekin. With his after-dinner cigarette, Sên remembered the confession he’d promised to make—in a book. Where was it? Kow would know, and when Sên rang, Kow did. Sên made himself very comfortable in his biggest arm-chair, and leisurely studied the book. In a way, it proved better worth the trouble than confession-books often do. Ivy had passed it about with discrimination. A number of distinguished men, and one or two such women, had written in it; notables whose acquaintance she had owed, no doubt, to Sir Charles. As he read and studied, Sên grew really interested. His “mea culpa” was going into uncommonly good-fellowship. There was not a nobody there! Unless Miss Gilbert herself was “no one.” Certainly Julia Calhoun Townsend was not even remotely a nobody. And almost every other name signatured there was known and reputed beyond both the width and the length of the Potomac.