She opened her eyes and met Barry’s gaze in awed silence. It was as if some unescapable burden lurked in there for their shoulders to take.
“We’re in it,” he said, “for good.”
“I feel like a sleep-walker driven to the edge of a chasm.”
“Don’t be miserable,” he said very gently. “We all live in night mostly, helpless on our little hills, watching the eternal worlds move by and wishing we could move our world. Look at this side of this globe! In ten thousand years while the earth has sloughed its crust, and deserts and gardens have changed places on it, man has undergone little change. It’s the same morass of human souls. Does it take ten thousand years for the human glacier to move an inch?” He flicked the reins restlessly, “Are we only picking at a cell with a pin?”
“And of all Asia’s static human curse, China is the worst,” Julie exclaimed, “slugs cumbering up the earth, repudiating every metempsychosis.”
“Ah! Personality is infinite in its range. I think you will find the Chinaman adds a little to the compass of the human soul. Do you dream that a people who chant their utterance have no imagination, or that, because they have bowed so long to fantastic tyrannies, they have no soul? I tell you that they are eating their chains through with their teeth. I’d give my life and my soul if Asia would set up a republic in the face of those worm-eaten kingdoms of Europe with their caste gradations and degradations of men, and their empirical divisions of the land of the earth. And there is a great hope upspringing, I believe—I know!”
A pretty olive-faced woman leaned out of a passing vehicle and looked at them. Barry raised his hat.
“Chad’s wife, Rosalie,” he explained.
“That was a big mistake, wasn’t it?” Julie said.
Barry looked grave. “Poor Chad, in one of his most exalted moments of national chivalry, thought he was making a cementing marriage with the East. But, as it has turned out, it seems that there is nothing at all that he can understand about Rosalie—with her display of adornments to the world; her laxities at home, and her eternal super-abundance of rice powder. He took his wife, as so many do in the East, under a veil; and now she has grown intolerable to his Western man’s soul.”