"But I was telling you of that June night. There was a rustle in the corner, and I ran from the little room. That house was full of ghosts to me, and there seemed no love in the world—only loneliness and twilight—my heart streaming its torrent upward and outward, but seeming to touch no living thing.
"I laughed at myself for being frightened by a little rustle and went back into the room. I saw a great gray moth at the window screen and then I remembered and ran to the desk where I had left the cocoon. The whole branch had fallen—and I got the picture of the birth of a winged thing there in the shadows. The moth itself was on the screen—a gleaming gray creation, with a light of its own about it—the light of the fairy world which I remembered from a child. The wings were whirring silently—the still strange creature poised for flight in the night, and held by this man-made screen. At the end of each feathered antenna was a pendent cross. I tried to open the screen, but it was old like all of the things of that house and I ran to find a servant.
When I returned, the moth was not alone. Its own had come to it through the twilight—answering some cry we are too coarse to hear. They were there together—a mystic pair of wonderful gray mates—one on the outside of the screen, one in the room. I could not wait for the servant, but cut a door in the wire with a rough bronze paper-cutter, and away they flew together."
It was her theme.
All that day Romney dwelt in her power. She gilded his world. He found that his relation to her was that of servitude. She commanded imperiously, dictating what they should say, where they should go, what they should eat and drink. Yet he was glad, for this had never happened before. It did not occur to him that this mysterious establishment of their relation was fatal to the real romance. Each minute forged him anew. She was great and glowing. He did not know that all the old ideals of wooing and winning that the world has come up through were impossible with her. Vaguely and darkly the hope formed that time might change something; that the luck of a white man in Asia might come to his aid.
Romney was less the mere crude male than most men. He had intuitions, visions, deep yearnings, answered to very little of the levelling dominance of the trade mind, but on the very points that he excelled, she chose to master him. It was as if he had been provinced in Asia and she had come from all the earth. His thought of her to-day was not the thought of yesterday. It did not dawn upon him that her changes might not be moodiness or incoherence, but the very width of her orbit and splendour of her diffusion.
There was at Longstruth's a Chinese boy who served them. He seemed to enter into their thought of the little delicacies. He had some English which Romney chose to use for a time, but there came a moment of late afternoon when a matter of service required explicit information, and Romney administered it in Chinese, excusing himself as he took his attention for a moment from the woman. He turned back to her to find a new interest in her eyes.
"Tell me about yourself," she said suddenly. "You must have come to China as a child to speak like that."
"No, I have been here only four years—three years in India before that. My ways have not been interesting. Since you came they have all been cheapened. I see I have wasted my time—"
"Now that is a good saying. Thank you. Sometimes, Sir Romney, you are very attractive—"