“Oh,” the girl said, a little disdainfully.
“You ought to try it,” he ventured. “Don’t you think it prettier?”
But the English girl would not own that. “Our way is the kinder,” she insisted.
“To the nags? Yes,” Sên agreed, “it certainly seems so. But your cavalrymen did not rise in their stirrups until recently. You should try it—sometimes.”
She shook her head.
“I don’t like learning new ways, Mr. Sên.”
“Or languages?”
“You don’t call Chinese a new language, do you?”
“It would be to you,” he retorted. “By the way, there are a great many distinct Chinese languages, nearly sixty. I wonder which you’d admire—least.”
“Horrors!” the girl cried. But she laughed softly—because he had said “least” when she’d thought he was going to say “most.”