Nang Ping greeted the additional guest with the widest outpush of her joined hands and the most stiffly formal bow she had made yet. But she liked this face; he looked, she thought, indeed an “honorable man.”
“Tea! By all means,” Mr. Gregory said briskly, steering for the richly laden toy tea-table in a businesslike way. He thought there’d been bowing and arm-shaking enough for a month o’ Sundays.
Low Soong giggled a little when Tom Carruthers lifted his hat to her—Nang shot her cousin a severe look—and then, to Mr. Gregory’s disgust, all the bowing and arm-waving was to do again.
“I am sorry not to serve tea in the English way,” Nang Ping said, as she returned to her seat. (Gregory had already taken his.)
“Why!” Mrs. Gregory protested, “what can be more delightful than to serve China tea in the Chinese way in China? And this is such a real treat to me! I can have my tea in our stupid home way—half cold and quite insipid—any day.”
“Well,” Gregory commented, leaning back negligently in his chair and stretching out his legs in comfortable abandon, “perhaps I’ve not been here long enough to appreciate Chinese customs. That’s the worst of being a real Englishman, Miss Wu—one misses English comforts.”
Tom Carruthers saw a tiny shadow of disgust cloud across Nang Ping’s painted mouth, and he knew, without looking, the distress on Florence Gregory’s face. “Mr. Gregory,” he interposed, “your tea,” and pointed to Gregory’s waiting cup.
They all were waiting to drink together; not to have done so would have been a rudeness.
“Oh!” Gregory vouchsafed, lifting the tiny piece of porcelain critically and tasting the brew gingerly when he had discarded the covering saucer a little roughly. And when he drank, the others drank with him.
He tasted the delicate tea superciliously, and disapproved it frankly. “Here, boy,” he called to one of the Wu servants, and holding out the cup with a disgusted grimace, “take it away.” The servant with the Wu crest embroidered on his back bowed low, stepped forward, bowed lower, and then took the offending handleless cup and gravely bore it away. And the four women looked on, Hilda amused, his wife distressed, the two Chinese girls smilingly imperturbable. It is difficult to decide which owes China the more apology—English missionaries or English manners.