The youth whistled softly. “Wait, Mr. Doane, please.... the fact is, you're clean over my head. I—I don't know a thing about our painting, let alone theirs. You see I haven't put in much time at—” He stopped. His smooth young brows were knit in the effort to think along new, puzzling channels. “But she would understand,” he added, honestly, softly.
“Exactly! She would understand. That is what I am trying to make clear to you.”
“But you're sort of—well, overwhelming me.”
“My boy.” said Doane very kindly, “you could go back home, enter business, marry some attractive girl of your own blood who thinks no more deeply than yourself, whose culture is as thinly veneered as your own—forgive me. I am speaking blunt facts.”
“Go on. I'm trying to understand.”
“—And find happiness, in the sense that we so carelessly use the word. But here you are, in China, proposing to offer your life to a Manchu princess. You do seem to see clearly that there would be difficulties. It is true that our people crudely feel themselves superior to this fine old race. As a matter of fact, one of the worthiest tasks left in the world is to explain East to West—draw some part of this rich old culture in with our own more limited background. But as it stands now, the current will be against you. So I say this—study China. Open your mind and heart to the beauty that is here for the taking. Try to look through the decadent surface of this tired old race and see the genius that still slumbers within. If, then, you find yourself in the new belief that their culture is in certain respects finer than ours—as I myself have been forced to believe—if you can go to Hui Fei humbly—then ask her to be your wife. For then there will be a chance that you can make her happy. Not otherwise.”
Doane stopped abruptly. His deep voice was rich with emotion. The boy was stirred; and a moment later, when he felt a huge hand on his shoulder he found it necessary to fight back the tears. The man seemed like a father; the sort of father he had never known.
“Don't ask her so long as a question remains in your mind. Defiance won't do—it must be faith, and knowledge. I can't let you take the life of that girl into your keeping on any other terms.”
The odd emphasis of this speech passed quite by the deeply preoccupied young mind.
“You're right,” he replied brokenly. “I've got to wait. Everything that you say is true—I really haven't a thing in the world to offer. I'm an ignorant barbarian beside her.”