"Perhaps you believe us incapable of such moments. I am quite sure you do. You have never seen our young men poring over stories whose sentiments would seem very startling to you. I don't know why I say our young men; our old men also. I could tell you of an officer of mine who spends all his pay buying costly medicines from Szechuen, so that his father, who is a very old man, may enjoy the society of a young wife. Have you read any of our poetry, Miss Davis? Do you understand our music? Have you seen paintings of women walking among fruit trees, in which the fruit trees seem like women and the women like fruit trees? Do you know that there has never existed a people more purely artist and therefore more purely lover than the Chinese? The fact is that it was to protect themselves from the excesses of their own temperaments that our earliest ancestors patiently and laboriously fortified themselves by a submission to ritual and authority. Of course we still retain excesses, being civilized, but our excesses are even now those they long ago decided to allow us. Yes, we are completely enmeshed, Miss Davis, like caterpillars in cocoons. I know that we seem very dull to you, because we no longer depend on a personal inspiration. But you must remember that the personal inspiration is apt to be dull to every one but to him who feels it. He, of course, is carried away by the intoxication of supposing he has created something. But because we refuse to be carried away by it or to depend on it, you must not imagine that we do not think with any profundity--nor feel with any passion." "Why do you tell me this? Is it really necessary that you explain everything to me, even your occasional moments?" Megan spoke sharply and she hoped indifferently, but her face was flushed. "Simply to show you how unaware you are of so many of the fundamental impulses of people around you. Those," he added gently, "whom you wish to help, to change. But don't be offended with me, Miss Davis. It is true that my admiration for you is enormous, and it is true also that I detest a lapse from suitability, a vulgar action. I would never do anything unworthy of either of us." "No," said Megan, "I feel sure you wouldn't. Now don't let us talk any more about it." "Certainly not if you find it so objectionable. But I wish you didn't. It is very trying never to be able to approach you as one human being to another. Because I see clearly I am not really a human being to you, simply a problem, an object of attack, and impersonal attack at that. Perhaps no one about you is entirely real to you yet. You are too young, you have lived too little. And because I am an alien I am even more remote than the others." "I'm not too young," said Megan indignantly. "I have lived much more than you think, and I have had disillusionments and disappointments." The General smiled. "Not really? Why even your voice is unbruised."