But Sên King-lo went steadily on. “Forgive me, if you dislike it, resent it so much. To me—it was a sip of cold water in a parching land, on a parching day. Perhaps I was wrong. Probably I was—for I never have seen a Chinese girl.”
Miss Gilbert’s resentment receded before her surprise.
“You never—have seen—a Chinese girl!” she said blankly.
“Not a lady,” he told her. “One sees coolie girls, of course—everywhere. But I have been from home a great many years now. When I was a boy Chinese ladies were not seen outside their own homes—as so many of them are now, I understand. And I had no sisters. My mother was only a girl when she left us, but I do not remember my mother. I was very young, a baby, when she went. I know a Chinese lady here and there: here in Washington, two; several in Europe—but they all are married ladies—and, too, they often seem to me a little un-Chinese, because they wear English clothes and eat with a fork—as, for the very same reasons, I, no doubt, seem not quite Chinese to them.”
Miss Gilbert glanced down involuntarily at his hand—he was lifting food with his fork, quite accustomedly—and she looked up again, a question she would not have asked for worlds in her eyes.
“Yes, indeed,” Sên told her, “I can use chop-sticks. I can eat ice-cream even with chop-sticks—if it is not very feeble—melted. But I like your forks much better.”
The girl colored slightly in her surprise. She had yet to learn that many Chinese can read thoughts almost as easily as they can read printed words.
“I never have known a Chinese woman at all well. Miss Townsend is my closest woman friend. Odd that, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” she agreed.
“And I never have seen a Chinese girl of our own caste.”