Page:Mr. Wu (IA mrwumilnlouisejo00milniala).pdf/142

 festival. On days of homely ease and unceremonied home-keeping her skin was as clean and unprofaned as a baby's.

It is a canon of Chinese womanhood never quite to undress unnecessarily. Modesty at her toilet, even when performing it alone, is enjoined the Manchu girl as it is the Catholic girl of Europe. And this Manchu niceness has permeated the other Chinese races. And in China a maid would be held not chary, but prodigal indeed, did "she unmask her beauty to the moon." A land of several peoples sharply distinct in much, China is in much else the land of great racial amalgamation. And it is impossible to trace back to their source many of this wonderful people's most salient qualities. Tartar has infected Mongol, Mongol inoculated Tartar, Taoist taught Mohammedan, Confucianism and Buddhism have mixed and fused, Teng-Shui tinged all, sometimes tainting and degrading, occasionally idealizing and lifting up to poetry. And modesty of body is simple instinct with Chinese girls of every blend and caste. Nor is it lost—as so many of youth's sweetnesses always must be everywhere—in the gray slough of old age. Nowhere in China will you encounter the unique exhibitions of antique female nudity that occasionally startle one so extraordinarily in Japan. The old women of China, even the poorest, are always clad, and a Chinese girl slips from the screening of her smock into the screening of her bubbling bath without an instant's flash of interim.

The early daylight showed Nang Ping very lovely, as she stood there in her one last garment. Chinese women of the mandarin class are often exquisitely lovely, especially those of mingled Manchu and Mongol bloods. Nang's sorrow was too new to have bleared or blowsed