“It is so, Your Excellency. My country, in that first, startled, clear glance, affected me—I may as well use the word—unpleasantly. It was utterly different from anything I had known, a trader's paradise, a place of unbelievable confusion, of an activity that bewildered, rushing to what end I could not understand.”
He was speaking now not only in the Chinese language but in the idiom as well, generalizing rhetorically as the Chinese do. It was almost as if the words came from a Chinese mind.
They were silent for a time Then the viceroy asked, in his gently abrupt way: “Why did you leave the church?”
“Because I sinned.”
“Against the church?”
“That, and my own faith.”
“Were you asked to leave?”
“No.”
“They knew of your sin?”
“I told them.”