CHAPTER XLVII
It rained all the next day, and King-lo sat with his wife and read to her and talked with her of England and of Ruben. And they wrote letters home—letters that would be long in going; for runners must take them to a distant, but the nearest, treaty-port, before they could make any positive postal start.
Towards evening Sên Ya Tin sent for her grandson.
Ruby scarcely expected to see her husband for hours; but almost at once, as she sat crocheting, he came back, eager of pace and of face—and a soberly dressed man followed him to her side and bowed, crossed his hands, and stolidly waited, not looking at Mrs. Sên but carefully eyeing the silk jumper she was making.
Deft-fingered always, Ruby practically had discarded needlework—even its pretty playtime offshoots—since her marriage, no longer in need of her own industry to be always well-dressed. She had liked to sew well enough, partly, no doubt, because she did it so well; but she had hated the necessity, and she always had taken more pleasure in shopping than in making or mending.
But in Hongkong King-lo had warned her, “You may be dull some days—just at first—at the homestead, while it is all strange. Take along something to do, something you like doing.”
Mrs. Sên had laughed it to scorn, the suggestion that she could be dull, even for an hour, alone with him in China, with him in the wonderful place he’d called home as a boy. But he had repeated his words, even appealing to her, and to please him she had laid in a great store of ivory needles and silks. And already she was finding the advice she had laughed at good, for already she had found the life in the women’s quarters monotonous and deadly. She could quite understand why the painted and jewel-hung prisoners smoked so incessantly. She herself was smoking more cigarettes in a day here than she ever had smoked in London or Washington in a fortnight. One must do something, drug the discomfort of personal stagnation with some sedative motion, if only of one’s hands. One couldn’t smoke all the time—at least, she could not, so she had begun an elaborate jumper that she didn’t need and could not wear in Ho-nan over a stiffly embroidered Chinese coatee.
She looked up at King-lo with questioning eyes.
“He’s one of the tailors,” Lo told her. “Sên Ya Tin’s best one. She has sent him to you.”
“To me! What ever for?”