"More or less at this time I was in touch with Americans in China who were making money. I lived a double life—holding fast to the commercial world, and keeping secret my enthusiasm for matters of mysticism. This recreation kept me from getting stale and tainted. The white man over here plays a lot, and he drinks too much at his play. Perhaps I’m getting too diffused in this story, but I rather wanted you to understand, since I began, the idea that drove me to become powerful in the native mind and at the same time to hold a grip on the West. I was disinclined to the poverty of the earth and at the same time unwilling to release my grip on certain ideas of Heaven. You see all real mysticism is out of the East. There was only one way to make good on this training and the Chinese knows how. The Hindu doesn’t. It’s to keep God and man separate, to keep the left hand for the spirit of things and the right for matter and the world. I had a gift in the beginning for these languages. I wouldn’t have gotten them without that. I wouldn’t have had the urge without it. It was that lust to know what the river-men were saying, and not only that, but to know why they said these things. A man might learn Chinese in a certain number of months, but he can’t learn the _feel_ of the people without a call to them. "Finding that I had mastered something, I proceeded to forget it. That means that the processes began to work automatically. I had learned to think in Chinese—that’s the truth—so much so that the English and American training I had known began to take on the same sense of distance and novelty that they would from the standpoint of a cosmopolitan Chinese. For instance, you and the yellow rug—even before you spoke, appeared to me in a kind of haze of romance—" He smiled at her. Romney was himself for the first time in her presence because he saw that his story was making her incline to him pleasantly. "Meanwhile," he added, "I had ceased to be a boy in certain ways, and I had come into a bodily health and strength that I never knew as a boy. I had learned to wait and I had learned how to laugh—" "That is much," Moira Kelvin said. Then Romney realized—perhaps it was something of premonition—that what he said was not quite as exact as it would have been before meeting her. "Perhaps it is too much," he replied quickly. "I would have said it without qualification before—before yesterday. I only mean in men-matters. Perhaps I have to learn how to wait and how to laugh all over again in the things that are nearer the heart. I was only talking about the pressures that the world put on a man. Perhaps I have not put away boyish things that pertain to a man’s relation with women, his woman. That’s an arcanum to me—" "Arcanums call you, don’t they, Sir Romney?" she asked. He saw the gleam of her eyes and teeth in the purple dusk.