I shook my head, and he said:
"Come with me to a drug store and I will supply you with a stock."
And I, decked in my grandmother's cast-off clothes, walked along the street, and into the "Palace Drug Store" with the elegantly dressed and caned professor.
He didn't seem the least ashamed of me; indeed, he was so polite that I forgot for the moment that my dress was anything odd—forgot it until I saw a young man clerk looking at me in an amused way; then I dropped my thick veil.
The professor insisted on my taking a certain kind of lozenge to hold in my mouth while I was in the infected house, and ordered quantities and quantities of disinfectants carried there, giving me instruction as to how they should be used.
When we were walking back to the house of Mrs. Yet, the professor remarked that the Chinese were a people worth studying.
"Have you heard any of their poetry, Miss Pearl?" he questioned. And before I had time to reply—perhaps he thought he had no right to make me give an answer to that question, he is a "great philologist"—he continued: "Could anything be more exquisite than those lines to a plum blossom?
"'One flower hath in itself the charms of two;
Draw nearer! and she breaks to wonders new;