Now, the situation regarding Professor Kiang’s wife was that for eight years his first wife had been hopelessly insane. In many parts of America you can divorce a wife who is insane, but in China you do not do this, because to divorce a woman is to inflict both upon her and her relatives a most dreadful disgrace. Insanity not being the woman’s fault, nor the fault of her relatives, it is unthinkable in China to seek a divorce for such a reason. What you do is to avail yourself of the privilege of having a second wife. As a rule the Westernized Chinese have but one wife, but in a case such as this they would have two, and the second wife would be treated with especial consideration because of the particular circumstances. When Professor Kiang married again, the relatives of his first wife attended the ceremony, and this same attitude to the matter was manifested by everyone. Witter Bynner went to China with Kiang, to collaborate with him in translating Chinese poetry into English, and Bynner writes: I can testify that the second wife has been signally honored; she was the first woman, for instance, to address a body similar to our chambers of commerce in the capital of Kiang’s native province, and she broke another precedent by addressing, together with her husband, the officers of Wu Pei-fu’s army. Wu Pei-fu is now, as you know, the Dictator of Pekin and more or less of China. It will interest you to know that he and his leading generals, being Christians, were concerned to know whether there might be any conflict between Socialism and Christianity, and found them upon investigation to be expressions of the same thing. If there were any objections to Kiang’s second wife, Wu Pei-fu, as a Christian, might have been expected to feel it. Perhaps his being a Socialist, however, incapacitates him for true morality! It had been understood that Professor Kiang was to return to the University of California; but now the Black Hand got busy. Not merely was there a flaw in Kiang’s marriage certificate; also, he was a leading Chinese Socialist, one of the founders of that movement in his own country. So he received from President Barrows a cruel and insolent letter, informing him that he was not to return. It was practically the same thing as the Gorki story, and both Gorki and Kiang were enemies of the interlocking directorate. But Semenoff was their friend, so you do not find Colonel Barrows, in espousing his Cossack hero, mentioning the fact that Semenoff was traveling in America with a lady not his wife; still less do you find him mentioning those thirty most beautiful women in Semenoff’s “summer car!”