"It must be very lonely," I said.
"I think I prefer it so," he answered, looking at one of the pictures on the wall. "They'd only be business people, and you know"—he smiled—"they haven't much use for missionaries. And they're not so intellectual that it is a great hardship to be deprived of their company."
"And of course we're not really alone, you know," said Mrs. Wingrove. "We have two evangelists and then there are two young ladies who teach. And there are the school children."
Tea was brought in and we gossiped desultorily. Mr. Wingrove seemed to speak with effort, and I had increasingly that feeling in him of perturbed repression. He had pleasing manners and was certainly trying to be cordial and yet I had a sense of effort. I led the conversation to Oxford, mentioning various friends whom he might know, but he gave me no encouragement.
"It's so long since I left home," he said, "and I haven't kept up with anyone. There's a great deal of work in a mission like this and it absorbs one entirely."
I thought he was exaggerating a little, so I remarked:
"Well, by the number of books you have I take it that you get a certain amount of time for reading."
"I very seldom read," he answered with abruptness, in a voice that I knew already was not quite his own.
I was puzzled. There was something odd about the man. At last, as was inevitable, I suppose, he began to talk of the Chinese. Mrs. Wingrove said the same things about them that I had already heard so many missionaries say. They were a lying people, untrustworthy, cruel, and dirty, but a faint light was visible in the East; though the results of missionary endeavour were not very noteworthy as yet, the future was promising. They no longer believed in their old gods and the power of the literati was broken. It is an attitude of mistrust and dislike tempered by optimism. But Mr. Wingrove mitigated his wife's strictures. He dwelt on the good-nature of the Chinese, on their devotion to their parents and on their love for their children.
"Mr. Wingrove won't hear a word against the Chinese," said his wife, "he simply loves them."