Page:Mr. Wu (IA mrwumilnlouisejo00milniala).pdf/55

 no English girl stirred his pulse or fogged his subtle shrewdness. James Muir, who watched over him faithful as a mother, had somewhat feared for him when the passing of adolescence into first raw manhood should come pounding at the door of sex. Muir knew that in that experience Englishmen in exile usually found some impulse toward vagary irresistible. But Wu lived on unruffled—alone in Europe, and content with loneliness.

He did not forget Li Lu, but he rarely thought of her now. No doubt she would do well enough when the time came to assert his ownership and desire sons. In the meantime, he was absorbed in carrying out to the minutest particle his grandfather's behest.

There was a girl at a parsonage where he sometimes visited that he thought less uninteresting than the others he met, less like a horse or a tornado or a pudding, more like a girl. And Florence Grey made him shyly welcome at her tea-table and taught him to play croquet. She played a beautiful game, and in their second match he could have beaten her. He gave her father's church a new organ, and made her first bazaar an unprecedented success: he half stocked the tables, and then saw that they were swiftly stripped. She knew of many of his "kind contributions," though not of all his re-purchases—they were indirectly made, and Mrs. Muir in Scotland was not a little aghast at the frills and flummeries her son sent her in three big packing-cases. And the Vicar looked a little askance at the presence of a smirking heathen god, conspicuous, but not for being overdressed, on his daughter's stall.

After the Oxford years came several years of travel, sometimes with Muir, sometimes not. One summer Wu was the Muirs' guest in their simple Scottish home.

After her first sternly concealed qualm or two, the