"That does not answer. If one’s country or business demand the man, the woman must wait—" "Yes." Romney laughed. Bamban waited for him to speak. "You keep them behind lattices. You do not give them the breath of life. You feel that they belong to a man’s weakness rather than his strength. You do not see that the girl is equal to the boy; that the two are one so far as the future is concerned. You think that all women are wanton, unless they are repressed." "We do not consider that women belong to the larger affairs of man’s life," said Bamban. Romney laughed again. "That’s why as a nation, the Chinese Empire is ninety-seven hundredths putrified," said he. There was not a look in Bamban’s clearly-formed face to denote if the depth and delicacy of his regard were shaken. "You are the messenger of our country," he said. "Hardly that—a messenger of the remaining three per cent," said Romney. *9* The next morning he went to the court of the Consulate, without anything in his hands. The night had been so rough for him that he was uncentred enough to seek the woman for a moment—just to look upon her, to ease off the mighty ache across his chest. He had become very humble from wanting her. Last night he had been touched with the coldness and hatred that seemed close to destroying the attraction between them, but the emptiness and irony of all life without her, had come in the hours following the talk with Bamban. The thing that he had called a taint diminished to one of the minor mysteries of womanhood, and Anna Erivan, brave enough not to quibble about the wonder of their meeting, and of spiritual force to forget her own longing and passion, stood forth with augmented light and lure. As he waited a mere moment within the gate of the court, it seemed that he would die if she did not come quickly. The pain that he had learned to identify with her in moments of their separation in presence or thought—a pain that began in the pit of his left arm and stretched to the centre of his breast—awakened to burning and agony in that moment before he heard her step. Words were on his lips to say that he loved her, that nothing mattered but that to him, that he wanted to die if he could not have her, that her own terms were his, that he could not take his thoughts much less his presence again from the place where she abode—a rush of confession and revelation altogether unlike the man that others knew or that he had hitherto known himself. She had been in the Forward Room. He heard the door and her step in the living-room; then at last she came to the door of the court, and all that he could say was: "Are you all right?" "Yes."