Page:Mr. Wu (IA mrwumilnlouisejo00milniala).pdf/146

 *ment) for a kinsman's crime is less fantastic and less fatuous than it seems to Western minds.

Basil Gregory and Nang Ping had sinned. Wu and Florence Gregory were to be punished with them. And because Nature forgives man less than she forgives woman, the sharper, surer punishment was to fall on the father and the son.

Compared with one year in Wu's life, the joy Nang Ping had stolen in the garden was but "as water unto wine." And, suffering now to her sharp young utmost, she was suffering less than he.

When day came he rose, as Nang Ping did, and went to the window. Her room was on the one higher floor; his looked almost level with the garden—his own garden. For he too had his own private pleasance, taboo to all, unless expressly bidden there. And Wu rarely gave that permission, even to Nang Ping. That bit of garden was his outer solitude, and this room was his indoor privacy. It was here and there he kept alone.

No race prizes privacy more, more realizes its value, conserves and guards it with more dignity and skill, or with so much. A people of interminable clans, knit together and interdependent as is no other people, yet it is with the Chinese people, both Mongol and Tartar, that individuality has its fullest rights, its surest safety.

Towards noon he bathed, put on again his plain dark robes, went into the great hall and ate a little rice. He had work ahead, much work, and he intended to do it well. He had no more time for thought, nor need. His thinking was done. His years of selfishness were past. He no longer saw or felt "a divided duty." He was China's now—Wu the mandarin. Each hour should be full. He would serve assiduously and relentlessly, not with brooding thought, but with action piled on action.