“I’ll not believe it!” Reginald liked the suggestion almost as little as Miss Julia had—and by it his personal vanity was stung, which Miss Julia Townsend’s had not been. “That low Chink——”
Emmeline threw out a dramatic hand, scattering ash into the embossed scales of the purple kimono’s handsomest dragon. “Not here!” she hissed. “No one that speaks with less than the deepest respect for Sên King-lo shall dare speak it here. He is Celestial!” and she sank back with an adoring moan on her prickly cushions—a stork’s leg rasped her cheek—but she was too highly or abjectly Chinese to wince.
“Rot!” Reginald replied.
He turned to his cocktail; she pulled broken-heartedly at her cigarette. She had a pretty collection of tiny pipes—Chinese and otherwise—but, like the chop-sticks, they had mastered her, not she them. She industriously kept them conspicuous, but she couldn’t manage to use them.
“Reggie,” she said presently, “can’t we help each other, you and I? Let’s.”
“How?” He spoke gloomily.
“We must think.”
Reginald acquiesced—if he did—by discreet silence, and waited for his sister to do the thinking; a process more in her line than in his—as they both knew, though Reginald rarely referred to the fact. He had but two gifts, beauty of person and splendor of raiment. Emmeline Hamilton was versatile and not without brains. Her silliness was a pose—his a reality and an emptiness. She affected asceticism and languor. He affected nothing but his surprising English accent. Even it he found no small strain and fatigue. If she had been born a boy, she might have attained to as successful and profitable a mountebankry as their father’s. Success, except in an almost floral display of haberdashery, was not for Reginald de Courcy Hamilton.
“You want to marry her?”
“Yep.” He rarely wasted his English en famille.