It was his flush that reminded her.
“I suppose I ought not to call you Tab,” she said a trifle incoherently, “but we actresses are bold and brazen women. I thought with your vast experience you would have known that. Really, I should have begun calling you Tab the first time I met you. And now you want to go—you are trying to tell me that you don’t want to go until I explain what it was that distressed me, and you are going to refuse all explanation about my poor nerves, so I can see we are likely to have an interminably quarrelsome evening. Come and see me tomorrow—Tab.”
He took her hand and kissed it, and felt awkward and artificial.
“That was very sweet of you,” she said gently.
When Tab left her he was feeling amazingly happy.
XXIV
To the left of the vermillion door of Yeh Ling’s new house was a tablet set into the brick buttress inscribed with those words, which to the old Chinese represent the beginning and end of philosophical piety: “Kuang tsung yu tou,” which in English may be roughly translated: “Let your acts reflect glory upon your ancestors.”
Yeh Ling, for all his western civilization, would one day burn gold paper before a shrine within those vermillion doors and would stand with hidden hands before the family shrine and ask commendation and approval for his important acts.
Now he was sitting on one of the very broad and shallow steps that led from terrace to terrace, watching the primitive system by which his engineer was getting ready the casting of the second concrete pillar. About the site were a number of bottomless tubs hinged so that they opened like leg-irons open to receive the ankle of a prisoner. Steel brackets on each enabled them to be clamped together to make a long tube. The first of these was in its place, and sticking up from the centre was a rusty steel bar that drooped out of the true—the core of the pillar to be. High above on a crazy scaffolding was a huge wooden vat, connected with the tub by a wooden shoot. All day long an endless chain of buckets responding to a hand-turned wheel had been rising to the top of the platform, their contents being turned into the vat.
“Primitive,” murmured Yeh Ling, but in a way he liked primitive things and primitive methods.