He spoke quite simply, for all his English training, too Chinese to feel any mawkish hesitancy in speaking to a friend, a girl he respected, of life’s best realities. Something that hurt a little, something new and strange, pricked at Ivy Gilbert’s heart.
Sên King-lo’s wife! His Chinese wife! She had never thought of her. She always had thought of him as just Sên King-lo—the Sên King-lo she knew and liked and talked with and rode with—unmarried, here in Washington to stay. More often than not she forgot that he was not English, more alien than she was, alien very differently from her. Of course he’d go back to China—and marry there—some day. Why not? How silly she was! All Chinese married. She didn’t know much about them, but she knew that much. Had his ancestors worn pig-tails? Even his own father, perhaps! It was a horrid thought. She looked up from the Chinese page of her book to the Chinese man on the other side of the small, low table between them, a sudden fear, a revulsion, in her young English eyes—and looked down again very quickly.
“Of course you couldn’t write it in English,” she spoke a little breathlessly; “you had to leave the space blank. There isn’t any English name for the Chinese name, of course. You couldn’t translate it.”
“No,” he told her, “that was not the reason. There is an English translation for many Chinese names—and this is one. I have written it in English—once or twice,” he added with a smile that neither he nor she understood.
“Then why—” she began.
“It was my girl-mother’s name, Miss Gilbert, and I love it for that, even far more than I do for the music it makes—it is music in my language and in yours. It was the last word my father ever spoke.”
“I beg your pardon,” Ivy told him shyly. “I’m so sorry. Of course, you wouldn’t write it in my confession-book.”
“But I did. I wrote it in Chinese. I’ll write it now in English, if you’ll let me. I didn’t when I wrote the English pages, because I could not take that liberty with your name.”
“My——”
Sên King-lo’s eyes kindled into hers. “My mother’s name”—his lips seemed to caress it as he spoke it—“was Ruby.”