Megan grew tired and very giddy as they made their way along in the enclosed chairs, and an emanation a little sickening began to steam up from the close-packed crowd about her. It struck her immediately and instinctively as a certain cruelty, though she could not place it very definitely unless it was in the overcrowding of any confined city, where the relentless fecundity of the population continues to turn out more human beings than there is need for. She felt it strongly however in the straining back muscles of her bearers, in the heads of the little scrambling children dusted with powder and plastered with paper seals over deep ulcers, and finally she heard it in the music of a wedding procession, in the midst of which rode the bride in her sealed, red satin chair, music that was acrid, irritating, aphrodisian. It was a great relief when they left the city and came out on the open shore of the lake. The sun was streaming through openings in the clouds and breaking into light and shadow the sustained lines of the mountains and the curving shore. Megan drew up the blind so that the cooler, cleaner air bathed her head. At the yamen Mah-li took her into one of the gardens a little way up the hillside, where in a stone pavilion were benches and a center table. "I know you would like tea," she said. "They will bring it here to us." Megan leaned her head against a pillar and closed her eyes. The air was full of the watery smell of the lake, and fatigue that was almost an appeasement flowed over her. She heard the General's voice and opened her eyes. He stood just outside the pavilion as if he had stopped on his way through the garden. "Have you been to the city?" he asked. "Yes." "You must not tire yourself. Remember, you are very important to me, I cannot return you in anything but good condition." "I suppose you mean I am now a sort of demonstration of your good behavior." "Just about that. By the way, you got the Shanghai papers?" "Yes. Thanks very much." "I suppose you enjoyed the experience of reading about yourself all those extravagant things that are only said when one is dead?" "I don't believe I enjoyed it. I kept thinking how dreadful it must be for my family to have to read these things. And then, it wasn't right somehow." "When I was a child," said Mah-li, "I was very sick once and every one thought I would die. So every one at the Mission was very kind to me, especially people that had never been kind to me before. Even the very cruel embroidery mistress brought me a large peony and laid it on my pillow. But when I got better they were all just as they had always been and the embroidery mistress made me work harder than ever."