Washington is a gossipy place—it gossips in many languages, and from several angles. There is even more talk in Washington than there is in Simla. But Washington rarely had a more diverting theme than this. “Ivy Gilbert and Sên King-lo” were on every tongue. But, oddly enough, not a word of it had reached either. No thought of marriage, not even of “love,” had occurred most remotely to the Chinese man or to the English girl. But she wore his perfumed lily-bells now—and they came more and more often. And Emma Snow knew what the florist himself could have told her, if she had not, that to no other woman, not even to Miss Julia, did Sên King-lo ever send lilies-of-the-valley. And the florist could have confirmed Lady Snow’s belief that to no other girl did Sên King-lo ever send a flower. But the florist kept lips as close as the Chinese Minister’s own. But while others guessed and wondered, the florist had not the slightest doubt of how it would end. The friendship begun by a common aversion to kissing, a jade-green frock, and a bunch of dangling crimson peppers grew—and more than once it pulsed. CHAPTER XVIII Emmeline Hamilton lay on a pile of cushions heaped on the floor, one hand under her head, her knees hunched up in what she thought a Chinese attitude, a cigarette she tried to imagine was opium in her mouth, a purple kimono, embroidered with blue chrysanthemums and red and gold dragons and beetles and smaller bugs, flopped loosely about her. She flattered the garment that it was ultra-Chinese, but it was merely an atrocious libel on the women of Japan. It revealed an appalling stretch of her amazingly thin legs and not only all her neck, but much that lies below necks. But that was less exposure than it sounds—for Emmeline was built as chastely flat as her mother: except for her nose and ears there scarcely was a jut on Emmeline. She caved in here and there thinly, but she nowhere bulged. A Chinese woman, even one whose profession was frailty, would sooner have strangled or starved herself or have perished by slow suffering inches than have exposed any part of her neck. But Emmeline didn’t know that. Her mawkish but intense and tigerish infatuation for Sên King-lo was no greater than her ignorance of his people and their customs. Her furniture, which had cost enough to be good, was a poor imitation of inlaid teak-wood. The room was thick and sneeze-provoking with the smoke of joss-sticks that by chance _were_ Chinese, which the prints and _kakemonos_ on the walls were not, but the prints were good of their sort, and the costumes they showed were the garb of an older China—for Japan took her dress, as she’s taken most she has that is best—from China centuries ago. The great gong that stood conspicuously and inconveniently in the middle of the room hailed from the Tottenham Court Road and had been made not far from that street of “Horse-Shoe” and furniture for cash or time-payment. A porcelain bowl