CHAPTER XLII
At daylight Sên Ruby came out from her tent, clad for the first time as Sên ladies had been since the older garbs of China (Japan, imitative in all things, wears them now) had been discarded.
She was laughing as she came, delighted with her new masquerade; it made her feel she had dressed for a big charity function of dance and fun at Albert Hall—highly pleased with herself and her fine new quaint clothes. Lo had chosen them well. He had chosen every “prettiest” garment she had had since her marriage. Her hair had been the most bothersome. She’d puffed it out and screwed it up; but it wouldn’t stay stiff, and its slight but established curliness would not “keep put”: it didn’t look right, and it felt horribly wobbly. Never mind, she’d try again after they’d breakfasted, and Lo should get her flowers and dangling buds to stick in it at rakish celestial angles! What fun! She wondered if Lo had brought his camera along. She hoped so!
A Chinese man came to meet her, a gentleman far more bravely clad than their servitors—more expensively clad, she thought, than she’d seen any man before; for Sên’s Chinese friends in Hongkong she had seen in Western dress only. How curious his clothes were! She didn’t like them. Chinese women’s clothes were picturesque and comfortable—the best of all clothes for fancy “dress up.” But these Chinese masculine garments that she saw now almost for the first time, she did not like; she thought them fantastic, absurd, unmanly—only fit for a comic opera. Who was he, she wondered, and how did he come to be here in this wild countryside—no dwelling for miles, but the tumbled-down inn with fat pigs and thin hens strolling in and out of it—this richly dressed man in a fur-edged under-coat of turquoise cashmere, a top coat of violet silk, and a skirt of gentian-blue-embroidered bright green? A man in petticoats! But she gave the stranger a courteous glance—Lo could not be far away. Then she smothered a giggle. Did the bedizened and skirted stranger think she was Chinese, she wondered.
And then she saw.
Repulsion disfigured her face, and she shrank back as she involuntarily screamed.
It was King-lo!
And she was his wife—the wife of a man in a petticoat!
She had screamed softly—scarcely a scream, but it had cut Sên King-lo as a sharp, poison-steeped sword.
His wife made her amends at once, laughed at her own silliness, pretended it had only been that he’d startled her. He’d said—she remembered it now—“if we wore;” but she hadn’t thought of it, hadn’t thought of anything but her own fine new things—they were lovely, perfectly sweet.
But they both knew that it was not surprise, but horror and revulsion, that had wrung that half-scream cry from her whitening lips.
They made the best of it—passed it by—both too well bred, too brave, and too kind to do less.
But it stayed.
And shyness—that slowly grew almost to strangeness—crept between Sên King-lo and his wife.