She had not told Lo. She could not tell him here. He must not know! No one must know or think of it here.
Why had she come? Had her cousin Charles no love of her left that he had not warned her of what life would be to her here?
For all her torture—and it had been just that—at leaving baby Ruben behind her, she had come with radiant gladness—impatiently eager to reach the country of her husband and to make it hers, without losing for an instant her own. Lo had done so much, perfect citizen of the world that he was! Why should his wife be less splendidly adaptable—more crassly insular? She had fretted, almost fumed, for the ship to go faster, reach China sooner, feeling it a laggard, and feeling,
“—so tedious is this day,
As is the night before some festival
To an impatient child that hath new robes,
And may not wear them.”
And yet she could have danced for joy and anticipation every waking hour of the way on the boats that had brought them.
If the impulse of all love is to create, its even greater, more constant, longer, finer impulse is to share. She had loved Sên King-lo well, and she had staked her soul to give him all that was she or hers, to have for her very own all that was he or his. That was why she had insisted upon leaving her child and crossing the world with her husband, crossing the world into China. She would give and she would take all. And he should set the key and choose and make the frame of their mutual being: marriage meant that, as her soul and the feminine instinct of her womanhood sensed and gaged it—and craved it. His people should be her people, his God her God. It had not been lust for adventure, or wilfulness, or freak. It had been loyalty, womanliness, and wifehood. A splendid, sacred trinity!
And they had failed her; she had failed them.