It was by no means a pleasant sensation. She had never loved China; had simply endured it, knowing little else. America she loved. It was of her blood, of her instinct. But now it was abruptly slipping out of her grasp—school, home, the girls, the boys, long evenings of chatter and song on a “front porch,” picnics on that ridge known locally as “the mountain,” matinées in New York, glorious sunset visions of high buildings from a ferry-boat, a thrilling, ice-caked river in winter-time, the misty beauties of the Newark meadows—all this was curiously losing its vividness in her mind, and drab old China was slipping stealthily but swiftly into its place.
She knit her brows. She was suddenly helpless, in a poignantly disconcerting way. A word came—rootless. That was it; she was rootless. For an instant she had to fight back the tears that seldom came in the daytime.
But then she looked again at Li Hsien.
He was smiling. It came to her, fantastically, that he, too, was rootless. And yet he smiled. She knew, instantly, that his feelings were quite as fine as hers. He was sensitive, strung high. He had been that sort of boy. For that matter the Chinese had been a cultured people when the whites were crude barbarians. She knew that. She couldn't have put it into words, but she knew it. And so she, too, smiled. And when she spoke, asking him to sit in the vacant chair next to her, she spoke without a thought, in Chinese, the middle Hansi dialect.
And then Mr. Jonathan Brachey looked up, turned squarely around and stared at her for one brief instant. After which he recollected himself and turned abruptly back.
Mr. Harting dropped down on the farther side of Doctor Hasmer. Which left his good wife between the two couples, each now deep in talk.
Mrs. Hasmer's Chinese vocabulary was confined to a limited number of personal and household terms; and even these were in the dialect of eastern Szechwan. Just as a matter of taste, of almost elementary taste, it seemed to her that Betty should keep the conversation, or most of it, in English. She went so far as to lean over the arm of her chair and smile in a perturbed manner at the oddly contrasting couple who chatted so easily and pleasantly in the heathen tongue. She almost reached the point of speaking to Betty; gently, of course. But the girl clearly had no thought of possible impropriety. She was laughing now—apparently at some gap in her vocabulary—and the bland young man with the spectacles and the pigtail was humorously supplying the proper word.
Mrs. Hasmer decided not to speak. She lay hack in her chair. The wrinkles in her forehead deepened a little. On the other side Mr. Halting was describing enthusiastically a new and complicated table that was equipped with every imaginable device for the demonstrating of experiments in physics to Burmese youth. It could be packed, he insisted, for transport from village to village, in a crate no larger than the table itself.
And now, again, she caught the musical intonation of the young Chinaman. Betty, surprisingly direct and practical in manner if unintelligible in speech, was asking questions, which Li Hsien answered in turn, easily, almost languidly, but with unfailing good nature. Though there were a few moments during which he spoke rapidly and rather earnestly.
Mrs. Hasmer next became aware of the odd effect the little scene was plainly having on Jonathan Brachey. He fidgeted in his chair; got up and stood at the rail; paced the deck, twice passing close to the comfortably extended feet of the Hasmer party and so ostentatiously not looking at them as to distract momentarily the attention even of the deeply engrossed Betty. Mr. Harting, even, looked up. After all of which the man, looking curiously stern, or irritated, or (Betty decided) something unpleasant, sat again in his chair.