From then they were thrown together almost constantly—not by others, but by circumstances and social accidents. And both to her surprise and to his—more to his than to hers—their acquaintance rapidly grew into friendship. It was nothing freakish, it was comradeship direct and unsilly. They met often, and knew that they liked each other, and liked to be together. They soon knew that they liked each other, but had no realization of how much. Sên King-lo suspected it first. Their divergences were a zest. And they had much in common, and that made between them a bond. Each was lonely—Ivy sometimes, King-lo almost always. Each was an alien, apart in an alien place. Each was at once homesick and homeless. Each found refreshment and tonic in the other. There were English traits and Chinese surprises in Sên, and personality that attracted her strongly. They had a score of English experiences in common. They were a boon to the homesick girl. The girl was virginal, and that attracted greatly the man of a people who cherish and reverence only one quality—maternity—more intensely than they do virginity. He knew that her friendliness had in it nothing mawkish. And in the wholesomeness of their friendship, and the wholesomeness and manliness of the man, Ivy quite forgot her first cheap desire to pique the girls who “ran after” him not too nicely. She was glad that Charles and Miss Julia valued Sên so highly, and she gave no more care or thought to what any one else thought or said of her new camaraderie. Not greatly educated, the English girl was beautifully intelligent: that attracted Sên King-lo even more than it at first surprised him. They liked and disliked many of the same things. They shared many prejudices. He was grateful to her for being beautiful, and for a hint of his own race now and then in eyes, gesture and voice. She was grateful to him for being always deferential, and often amusing, always companionable and interesting, and for his dependability to know whether Eton or Harrow had won at Lords, whether Surrey or Middlesex was at the top of the cricket average, and all about every stroke Oxford and Cambridge had made from Putney start to Mortlake finish. The girl found the keener interest, the man stumbled into the stronger liking. But while she found no fault in him, he found a terrible fault in her, and it rankled his quickening and strengthening liking sorely; her indifference to all children, even to her own little cousins. The opal owes its loveliness and its lure to its flaw. The Chinese soul of Sên King-lo could see nothing but deformity and disease in the slightest flaw that even specked a girl’s womanliness. It grieved him that a girl who, he knew, attracted him more each time they met did not care for little children. He held it an enormity; it rankled and it bit.