A great English statesman was the lion of the January hour. His name was world-known, and he had married a minor royalty. He was staying with the Snows, and Lady Snow’s big drawing-room was insufficient for her callers. Sir Charles and his wife had gone with the Duke to the White House an hour ago, and Sên King-lo and Ivy were looking at the confession her cousin’s guest had written just before dinner; the first contribution of that sort she had asked for since Sên’s. “That reminds me,” she said, as he closed the book, and she took it from him and opened it again, turning the pages until she found his, “I’ve always meant to ask you or Charlie and always forgotten to do it—I’ve such a sieve of a head.” She laid her finger below the character that stood for a woman’s name. “Will you pronounce it for me?” Sên spoke the Chinese word. She made him repeat it and tried to say it after him. “Oh, it would take me years! What an appalling language!” She laughed at him. “But I like your favorite name, Mr. Sên. I like its sound when you say it. I think it is beautiful.” “The most beautiful word in the world to me,” Sên said—“the most beautiful name in the world. We Chinese are said to crave only sons. But as long as I can remember, my heart’s desire has been to have a daughter whose mother would let me give her that name.” He spoke quite simply, for all his English training, too Chinese to feel any mawkish hesitancy in speaking to a friend, a girl he respected, of life’s best realities. Something that hurt a little, something new and strange, pricked at Ivy Gilbert’s heart. Sên King-lo’s wife! His Chinese wife! She had never thought of her. She always had thought of him as just Sên King-lo—the Sên King-lo she knew and liked and talked with and rode with—unmarried, here in Washington to stay. More often than not she forgot that he was not English, more alien than she was, alien very differently from her. Of course he’d go back to China—and marry there—some day. Why not? How silly she was! _All_ Chinese married. She didn’t know much about them, but she knew that much. Had his ancestors worn pig-tails? Even his own father, perhaps! It was a horrid thought. She looked up from the Chinese page of her book to the Chinese man on the other side of the small, low table between them, a sudden fear, a revulsion, in her young English eyes—and looked down again very quickly. “Of course you couldn’t write it in English,” she spoke a little breathlessly; “you had to leave the space blank. There isn’t any English name for the Chinese name, of course. You couldn’t translate it.” “No,” he told her, “that was not the reason. There is an English translation for many Chinese names—and this is one. I have written it in English—once or twice,” he added with a smile that neither he nor she understood. “Then why—” she began.