Yet Chan-King's personal fascination for me, his never-failing appeal to my imagination, were definitely founded on the Oriental quality in him. I found throughout the years, in every phase of our relation, a constant, irresistible, always recurring thrill in the idea that we were not of the same race or civilization.
Once when I confessed this fact to him, he said, "Do you love me only because I am Chinese?"
"No—I think I should have loved you no matter what race you came of. But how can I know?"
"I like to feel that you love the essential me."
"Yes, but the essential you is Chinese."
He thought a moment. "Chinese, yes, but a most respectable member of the Dutch Reformed Church of America!"
"I won't let that injure you in my eyes!" I assured him, laughing. I was of the Anglican faith, and we often referred to the strange mixture of nationalities in our creeds.
My husband, in spite of his firm faith, was not of a deeply religious mind, and of the two I was much more mystical in my beliefs. Love, divine and human, had come to mean everything to me, in a literal and spiritual sense. I believed, obscurely at first, but with increasing surety and faith as time went on, that human love also was not of time only, but of eternity as well. And, when I found that Chan-King did not share this belief, I felt, for the only time in all my marriage, alien to him, shut out by an impalpable veil from his profoundest inner life, which I wished passionately to share in everything. The discovery came hand in hand with our first shadow—only the shadow of a shadow, I might call it, so vague, at the beginning, that we could not feel more than an uneasiness.
Chan-King fell ill, though not seriously, and he recovered quickly. But on the up-curve of returning health he never quite regained the old plane of physical well-being. Signs—oh, the very smallest of signs—warned us of a grave, slow breaking down of his system under phthisis. We could not quite believe it.
His physician advised him to ease the strain of work as much as he could. We talked together in the early hours of many nights, Chan-King always insisting that his depression was the result of temporary fatigue, sure to pass away with a few weeks' repose in the open air of the hills.