“It was her fathers’ flag for nearly a hundred years, Mr. Sên. At home she is a Southern woman first and last. ‘Dixie’ is her anthem, Lincoln and Grant anathema. But here she is just an American woman, proud of every state in the Union.”
“Then she has broadened—very much,” Mrs. Sên exclaimed.
“No,” Sên objected. “I fancy it’s merely a matter of breeding; ‘company manners’ abroad.”
“Precisely,” Dr. Ray agreed, “a sort of traveling cloak that she considers it good taste to wear. But, by the way, Ivy, I did not ‘let’ Miss Julia attend the hula dance. I was not there and did not even know anything of her going until several days later. I was away in Molokai. This is a pleasure jaunt for Julia, but I came for a different purpose. There are several diseases that I have wished for years to see at short range in their native lairs. And when I found that Miss Townsend really was making this trip—the wisest thing she ever had done, I thought at the time, and now I know that it was—I almost instantly decided to link my travel up with Julia’s, and that’s how I come to be here now. Oh! Is that Ruben?” She left the chair that Sên had placed for her where the shaded breeze came in from the garden and took up the photograph in the lacquered frame and studied it minutely, with wise, kind eyes that again told very little of the thoughts behind them. “Very, very charming!” was her comment as she replaced it.
“He doesn’t favor my side of the house, does he!” Sên King-lo demanded with a laugh. “Our son is very English.”
“Very, and very handsome!” Dr. Ray answered cordially. But to herself the physician added: “And more interesting than handsome. He is your first-born: a throw-back, of course, to some blonde ancestor of your wife’s. Baby number two may be as Chinese as baby number one is Saxon. What then?”
“What did Miss Julia think of the hula dance?” Sên King-lo asked slyly, as they sat at lunch.
“That,” Elenore Ray replied, “I have not been told. She has never referred to it; but I gathered from Dinah that her mistress spent the next day in bed, with the blinds down. Uncle Lysander was certain sure powerful scandalized. He claims to have blushed all over and to have been nuffin but a jelly.”
“What do Lysander and Dinah think of China?” Sên persisted.
“Lysander is as frightened as if he were alone in a churchyard at midnight,” Dr. Ray told them cheerfully, “and Dinah giggles more than ever. I have to give her ‘drops’ every night to calm her—and I make them bitter. Dinah does not add to the dignity of our party. Now it is my turn to ask questions.” And she turned the talk into more impersonal channels.