He stopped still. His round, butter-yellow face was marked by a look of almost ludicrous alarm. His tiny, pinkish button of a nose crinkled and sniffled like that of a frightened rabbit. His pudgy, comfortable little hands opened and shut convulsively. His jaw felt swollen, out of joint. His tongue seemed heavy, clogging, like something which did not belong to him and which he must try to spit out. Little blue and crimson wheels gyrated madly in front of his bulging eyes. * * * * * Ng Ch’u was a coward. He knew it. Nor was he ashamed of it. To him a prosy, four-square, sublimely practical Chinese, reckless, unthinking courage seemed incomprehensible, and he was too honest a man to find fascination or worth in anything he could not understand. Still it was one thing to be afraid, by which one lost no face to speak of, and another to appear afraid, by which one often lost a great deal of face _and_ of profit, and so he collected himself with an effort and greeted the Manchu with his usual, faintly ironic ease of manner. “Ten thousand years, ten thousand years!” “And yet another year!” came the courtly reply; and, after a short pause, “Ah--friend Ng Ch’u!” Showing that recognition had been mutual. They looked at each other, smiling, tranquil, touching palm to palm. They were carefully, even meticulously, dressed: the Chinese in neat pin-stripe worsted, bowler hat, glossy cordovan brogues that showed an inch of brown-silk hose, and a sober shepherd’s-plaid necktie in which twinkled a diamond horseshoe pin; the Manchu in pontifical Prince Albert and shining high hat with the correct eight reflections. Both, at least sartorially, were a very epitome of the influence of West over East. * * * * * In that motley New York crowd, nobody could have guessed that here, in neat pin-stripe worsted and pontifical Prince Albert, stood tragedy incarnate: tragedy that had started, four decades earlier, in a Manchu-Chinese border town, with a girl’s soft song flung from a painted balcony; that had threatened to congeal into darkening blood, and that had faded out in a whispered, sardonic word about the Huang T’ai Hou, the Empress, the Old Buddha, and a coolie’s stupendous Odyssey from a mud-chinked Ninguta hut to a gleaming Fifth Avenue shop; tragedy that, by the same token, had started four centuries earlier when red-faced, flat-nosed Tatars, led by iron-capped Manchu chiefs, had poured out of Central Asia, to be met by submissiveness--the baffling submissiveness of placid, yellow China--the submissiveness of a rubber ball that jumps back into place the moment you remove the pressure of your hand--the submissiveness of a race that, being old and wise, prefers the evening meal of rice and fried pork to epic, clanking heroics.