It brought a lump in my throat to look at her as I saw her set out for her home with two little black-eyed Chinese girls crowded in the litter beside her. She was taking them home from the school at Fen Chou Fu. The loneliness of her life! The sacrifice of it! I wonder if those three women, shut away in that little walled town, made any converts. I doubt it, for theirs, like the Yung Ning Chou mission, was purely a faith mission.
Unmarried women and widows were these three women. The Yung Ning Chou mission consists of four old bachelors and three old maids. Not for a moment do I suppose the majority of the Chinese believe they are what they are, men and women living the lives of ascetics, giving up all for their faith, and the absence of children in child-loving China must seriously handicap them in their efforts to spread their faith. Think of the weary years of those workers toiling so hopelessly in an alien land among a poor and alien population, whose first impulse is certainly to despise them. All honour to those workers even though they have failed in their object so far as human eye can see, and even though that object makes no appeal to people like me.
