She turned and, finding a chance, spoke with the man on her other side.
After that the table talk became more general—as Miss Julia best liked it.
Much of it was talk well over Ivy Gilbert’s head. She had heard of the League of Nations and she knew—superficially—what Bolshevism was, but she never had heard of Lombroso, or of the cave-temples of Ajanta. She did not know who Akbar and Barbur were. She did not know who “John Doe” was. Nor what Pragmatism meant. She never had heard of Knut Hamsun. She listened, not greatly interested, and she contributed nothing. And she was vexed that the only two men of any special note or maturity there directed a great deal of their conversation to Mr. Sên King-lo, and that the part he bore in all that was said seemed not only the least mean and quite the ablest, most interesting, but also the quickest and easiest. Certainly his use of English was the supplest there. A Chinese turn of her wrist indeed! She wondered if the odd, tan-colored creature was able to think in English? He spoke the language—hers and Shakespeare’s—almost as if he must think in it. And he must have been speaking it for a good many years—his r’s were not l’s. There was more a something Eastern in the timbre of his voice than anything distinctly a foreigner’s in his accent. He spoke her own tongue more as she did, more as she’d usually heard it at home—though perhaps not invariably in Balham—as she always heard it in Washington, or heard it at Harvard or under the elms of New Haven, when she’d been there last summer for a few vivid international days.
There was no dancing after supper. There was chit-chat and music—out on the porch. They sang “Annie Laurie” and “Oft in the Stilly Night” and a fairly long program dictated by Miss Julia. Then she commanded Mr. Sên to play—and to sing that little song she’d liked so much the other night. But he had not brought an instrument—neither a lute nor his guitar. Ivy Gilbert’s lip curled a little. So, he was a troubadour, too! He ought to have worn his lute, or a gilded, inlaid harp, to the garden party, slung over his shoulder on a ribbon. She wondered if he could use his fists! Those delicate, graceful hands did not look as if they’d be much good at fisticuffs!
“You are not to come without it again,” Miss Julia told him.
“When I call on Sunday mornings, or meet you at the Wardman Park Inn for lunch, Madame?”
“You know what and when I mean,” Miss Julia told him severely. “Go and get a banjo—or something.”
Sên King-lo rose instantly. “ ‘In all my best I shall obey you, Madame,’ ” he said with a low and humble bow, and went off towards the “quarters” beyond the kitchen-garden.
Did Miss Townsend lunch with a Chinese at the Wardman? Ivy wondered. Did many women do so?
How—how extraordinary! But it was rather sporting of Miss Julia.