But in the attraction that Sên King-lo felt in this English girl there was no abnormality—unless the friendly touch of yellow and white hands is in itself abnormality. He had been educated in her country and in its ways. In much he _was_ English. He not only could read, write and speak her language, but he could think in it—and often did. He had read more English books than she had, knew more English facts than she did—and knew far more of the deeds, the years, and the thought that have made England. And between the typical English and the typical Chinese the difference is surprisingly small—and is mostly superficial: a matter of skin-tints and of bone-formation. There _is_ a spiritual difference—we in England have not learned to repose on Nature, to merge in her as the Chinese do, and we reverence ancestry and old age less, guard childhood less loyally, less tenderly. But England grows—as America does—in all this. And if the race of Shakespeare and Shelley and Newman lives up less to its ideals, grasps them less and less generally than does the race of Han, the ideals of the two—at best—are the same. We—Anglo-Saxons and Celts—have less vision than the Chinese and its interknit and absorbed races have, but a gleam glows in the sky of the Occident—it peeps through the blanket of our dark. We are less insular than we were—some of us at least. The Oriental lectures—than which nothing in London is more worth having—at the School of Oriental Studies in Finsbury Circus are sparsely attended, but some of us do go, and come away grateful. The East always will be East—in spite of intermittent, ape-like freaks. Probably the crasser West always will be West. But the two may meet yet, concordant parts of one splendid whole. The attraction of the Western woman for the Eastern man _in the West_ is a simpler and a more normal thing than her attraction of him in the East. Debarred from the womanhood of his own race in London or New York, because there are no such women there, an Oriental’s leaning towards an East-and-West marriage or intimacy has something of the humdrum quality of poor Hobson’s narrowed choice. Sên King-lo never had seen a Chinese girl! Ivy Gilbert’s attraction of Sên first and last was a matter of personality and of person. Probably its next strength was a matter of caste. She seemed to him wholly and charmingly patrician. Sên King-lo—as many young Chinese have done ever since Wang-Ah Shih made an Empire and an Emperor ridiculous—believed himself to be “republican”; but he was not. He could not be. He saw in Ivy Gilbert the caste of his mothers—the ancestral women he worshiped. He saw in Ivy—a slip of English girlhood—the imperial feminine of a great, puissant, imperial people.