CHAPTER IV
The supper was long. It might have been called a little heavy, if the food had not been so very good. It is not of the South to offer a guest a simple meal. Miss Julia gave her guests more than fried chicken and quivering ice-cold jellies. She gave them scalloped oysters, she gave them corn-oysters (an entirely vegetable but very “filling” dish). She gave them gumbo, and pickles made out of water-melon rinds. She gave them several salads. The oysters were not the sole shellfish, and the sweets—Miss Julia called them all “the dessert,” and Uncle Lysander called them all “puddin’ ”—covered the shining tops of two great priceless sideboards, and their overflow covered one of the long, narrow side-tables. They sat a long time at supper. The oysters had given place to lemon sherbet as Sên King-lo had quoted Confucius, and after the sherbet he turned and talked for a time to his left-hand neighbor, and the English girl chatted to the New Orleans man on her right. But after a course and another, they spoke together again—the merest social decency, since their hostess had put the girl on his right hand.
“It sounded hard—very nearly impossible to learn,” Ivy said, taking up their chat just where Miss Julia had torn it.
“Will you try?” Sên asked lightly. “I’d like to teach you—Chinese.”
“I don’t think you would,” the girl retorted. “I’d not like to teach any one anything. I teach for my living.”
“You!” the Chinese exclaimed—frank and honest admiration in tone and glance. “How young you are to know enough to follow that great career. The greatest of all careers, we think.”
“I don’t know anything at all,” Ivy assured him. “I only teach C-A-T—cat; B-A-T—bat; and wash their faces—my cousins Dick and Blanche—when they’ll hold their faces still long enough. And when they don’t their mother scolds me. I hate it all—and so do they. But I have to—to earn my living.”
Sên King-lo looked more approval than sympathy. Poverty is no social bar-sinister in China, scarcely a handicap in what, until the Manchus fell, was the soundest and truest democracy in human history—not a rabble democracy, but a democracy of dignity, justice, fair play and spiritual equal chance.
“Yes, I should like teaching you Chinese,” he insisted.
“Why ever, why?” the girl demanded discouragingly.