“He really means to come then?”
“Why, surely.”
“And you? Shall you like it?”
She assented a little doubtfully.
“I think I would rather live in New York,” she confessed, “but I can’t fancy Uncle there. I think that would be expecting a little too much of him. He still has friends and a few relatives in England.”
“Pretty sporting of him to break away at all,” Gregory observed, “after all these years.”
“I think it is marvellous,” she agreed. “I am sure if I hadn’t come, he’d rather go on living in that strange, smelly little house of his and read Chinese manuscripts and interpret Chinese hieroglyphics round old ornaments, and talk Chinese literature with some of the quaintest-looking people you ever saw up at the University, than do anything else in the world.”
“All the same,” Gregory remarked, “they say that a man should always return to the country of his birth to end his days. Besides, China is no place for an Englishman after a certain number of years. He’d become nothing but an old fossil without the society of his own kind.”
“What a nice, consoling person you are,” she declared. “Sometimes I’ve had it on my conscience a little that I’m taking him away from the things he likes best in life.”
“I shouldn’t worry about that,” he told her. “He’ll be better at home amongst some of his old cronies, and for you—well, of course, China would be utterly impossible.”