At first he stirred restlessly; then watching, doglike, fell to listening. The disconcerting thing was that it could mean so much to her. For it did—her dark eyes were bright, and her chin was uplifted. Her quaint accent and her soft, sweet voice touched his spirit with an exquisite vague pain.
“It is music,” said she.
“I don't see how you remember it all,” said he listlessly.
“Jus' the soun's. Oh, it woul' be won'erful to make words do that. So often I wish I ha' been born American, so it woul' be my language too.”
She went on, breathlessly, with Yeats's—=
"When you are old and gray and full of sleep..."=
And then, still in pensive vein, she took up Kipling's L'Envoi—the one beginning—“There's a whisper down the field.” Clearly she felt the sea, too; and the yearning of those wandering souls to whom life is a wistful adventure, and the world an inviting labyrinth of beautiful hours. She seemed to know the Child's Garden of Verses from cover to cover, and other verse of Stevenson's. It was all strange to him, except “In winter I get up at night.” He knew that as a song.
And so it came about that on a dingy Yangtze junk, at the feet of a Manchu girl from America, Rocky Kane felt for the first time the glow and thrill of finely rhythmical English.
She went on, almost as if she had forgotten him. William Watson's April, April she loved, she said, and read it with a quick feeling for the capricious blend of smiles and tears. It dawned on him that she was a born actress. He did not know, of course, that the theatrical tradition lies deeper in Manchu and Chinese culture than in that of any Western people.
She recited the beautiful Song of Richard Le Galliene, beginning:=