Page:Mr. Wu (IA mrwumilnlouisejo00milniala).pdf/56

 friend's mother took an immense liking to the young Chinese, and her he liked at once, perhaps better than he had ever liked any one but his grandfather and her son. And it was in no way an attraction of opposites. Worth and courage recognized worth and courage, and felt at home with them. Ellen Muir and young Wu were both indomitable, naturally upright, proud, clannish. They had twenty qualities and several prejudices in common.

They talked together gravely for hours. He helped her often as she moved keenly about her housework, and Muir rocked with silent laughter at the sight, knowing that those delicate yellow hands had never performed anything menial before, and in all human probability never would again.

Wu watched his hostess with lynx eyes, and the more he watched the more be respected and admired. Late at night, in the hour he invariably spent alone, and had done so from his first coming to England—the hour in which he read and wrote and spoke and thought in Chinese, when in spirit, and bodily too, he made obeisance to his ancestors' tablets across the world—he wrote down carefully much that she had said and that he had learned from her. Among his many sons the gods might send a daughter, and if they did she too should learn of Ellen Muir.

Wu knew, of course, that many of the English ladies he had seen at theaters and had met at aristocratic dinner-tables were respectable, above reproach. But he had never yet escaped a shudder of contempt when he had seen one "dressed" for evening. He had seen the coolie women, in the cocoon sheds on his grandfather's silkworm farms, scantily clad in one brief garment, that by their own chilliness they might be warned if the room grew too cold for the delicate spinners, and that they