This is the problem all returned students have sooner or later to face and conquer. They come home brimming with hope and filled with aspirations towards their country's betterment. And gradually they are forced to acknowledge one enormous fact--that China has been her glorious, grim old self for too many centuries, her feet are sunk too deeply in the earth of her ancient traditions, to be uprooted by one generation of youth--or two or three or a hundred. Chan-King chafed and worried and worked too hard. Strangely enough, he grew home-sick for America, though I did not. "America strides like a young boy, and China creeps like an old woman!" he said bitterly one day after attending a meeting of the college board, where his modern ideas of education had suffered a defeat at the hand of the reactionary body. "But China is a wise, wise old woman!" I replied gently. And very often during this time I would uphold the traditions of the East while Chan-King championed the ways of the Western world. My husband underwent disappointments, irritations and trials that would have been unendurable in a less securely poised nature. As it was, he suffered so in the great things that he had but little patience for the small ones, and I often found him sudden of temper, with a quick asperity of tone and finality of judgment that showed me clearly how great a strain he was under. But with us there was always love. And Chan-King was very careful to make me understand, even in the midst of small disappointments and vexations, that these things were the universal human annoyances that had nothing to do with regrets or a sense of alienation. I broke into tears one day when a sharp little scene occurred over nothing at all. "Oh, Margaret, my dearest!" he said, taking me in his arms, "these moods mean nothing between us, when we love each other so! Don't take them seriously! What could destroy our happiness now?" In spite of the world-wide difference in our race and upbringing, whatever difficulties of temperamental adaptation we had to meet were merely such as must be faced by any husband and wife in any land. Yet Chan-King's personal fascination for me, his never-failing appeal to my imagination, were definitely founded on the Oriental quality in him. I found throughout the years, in every phase of our relation, a constant, irresistible, always recurring thrill in the idea that we were not of the same race or civilization. Once when I confessed this fact to him, he said, "Do you love me only because I am Chinese?" "No--I think I should have loved you no matter what race you came of. But how can I know?" "I like to feel that you love the essential _me_." "Yes, but the essential _you_ is Chinese." He thought a moment. "Chinese, yes, but a most respectable member of the Dutch Reformed Church of America!"