“Do you hold,” Sên asked with a slight smile, “that all who are good are great?”
“I do—the greatest.”
The five harmless revelers were near them again, for the hillside road had swung round on itself, and the singers were not far away and directly overhead; and the Leicester Square doggerel belched stridently down: “My mother-in-law she’s got a walk like a crab and a tongue like a toad.”
“This is not China!” Sên King-lo said, in sudden unleashed passion.
“Tell me something—” the woman laid a motherly hand on his hand that lay on her chair, and her eyes that were very kind also were twinkling. “Do you hate and despise the Manchus as much as you did?”
“No,” the Chinese man said quickly, “I do not. I am older. And I see what I see.” He smiled back at her as he spoke, but his eyes and his voice were sad.
The chair coolies came to a quiet halt, as they often do at some point of special beauty.
Elenore Ray gazed about her with a sigh of great content.
“I wish you could have seen Hongkong as it was but a few years ago,” Sên King-lo said, as they moved on again.
“This is supremely beautiful,” Dr. Ray insisted. “But,” she added musingly, “I begin to suspect that the missionary and the gunboat have a great deal to answer for.”