“Yes, I liked her,” the other said promptly. “And I like her face.”
“I like all of her,” loyal Miss Julia insisted. “I shall ask the children here again. You must come, too, Mr. Sên.”
“Gladly. I asked Lady Snow today to let me see them. But, of course, she could not.”
“Because they were here. And that is why you came so late—when you knew they’d be gone! You must be anxious to meet them! So—you know Lady Snow well enough to call!”
“I was not sure they would be gone, Madame,” Sên said a little lamely.
“Humph!” Miss Julia commented.
Dr. Ray smiled at the carpet.
“I wish—yes, Lysander, we are coming,” for Lysander was bowing and grinning in the doorway, “I wish Ivy had a gayer time,” Miss Julia repeated as she led the way to the dining-room. “Every girl has a right to have a good time. As nice a girl as Ivy Gilbert has a right to a great deal of fun and gay good times. They need it,” she sighed softly, and Sên thought she looked sadly across her garden as they passed the hall’s wide windows. Her own girlhood had been defrauded of its gaiety-right—robbed by war’s seared and shriveled aftermath.
No pleasanter meal-time passed in Washington that night than passed at Miss Julia’s supper-table. The odd trio proved as congenial as it was odd. Of the two Southern women, one since babyhood had passed all her life here and a stone’s throw from here, and had lived all of it as her foremothers had lived in the old regnant Virginia days. The other was traveled, experienced, steeped in life’s up-and-downs, scarred and made taut by its jolts, chiseled fine by its jars, broadened and perfumed by the sacrifices it had called upon her for, and by the unfailing dignity and soul-loyalty, the supreme personal courage with which she never failed to make the sacrificial payment. Both the women wore time’s diadem of soft snow above their clear, clean foreheads, and God’s love in their hearts, God’s fellowship in their souls—one with the mind of a man and the heart of a woman, a woman of the world, chastened and puissant, a creature of dignity and of enormous force and charm; the other changed in little—in little that counts—from her earliest girlhood, a child still in much, as full of prejudice as she was of goodness and sweetness. Both caught now the slow music his scythe made as the Reaper garnered the human grain down by the cold, dark river. The man—an alien Chinese, far from the home he loved, was at ease here, as everywhere, but never at home, never to be at home save in the home of the wild white rose—still in his youth, ginger hot in his mouth, the cup as yet but just to his lip, his fight to come, his spurs to win, his soul girded but still very young, vowed to a cause some thought already lost—well, they too had seen their cause lost, their flag torn—never soiled—in defeat. He was seeking and striving for victory’s crown; one of them knew—for she had won and wore it—that defeat has the greater crown.
Dr. Ray was much interested to meet Sên King-lo, and to see and consider him in this easy, intimate way. She had known many Chinese—but not before a Chinese gentleman.