Page:Mr. Wu (IA mrwumilnlouisejo00milniala).pdf/57

 might easily shelter the hatching worms beneath their breasts, but that semi-nudity was a necessity and had a use, and rarely was the privacy of the shed invaded; but women undressed (as he termed it) collectively, voluntarily, and interspersed among men, he thought abominable. Ellen Muir did not dine in décolletage.

The eminent scholar—for as such the scholar world now recognized Wu's once tutor—she commanded, and even at times reprimanded, sharply, exacting and receiving the docile obedience of a tractable child. And that appealed to Wu as inevitably as did the high-necked stuff gowns. Mother ruled sons so in China. And in China sons showed their mothers just such meek obedience. The keeper of many of the most valuable treasures at the British Museum spilled marmalade on her best tablecloth one day, and she scolded him roundly, and Wu saw nothing funny in it, and would not, had he known that the son had bought the cloth and kept up the home.

The little house stood on one of the loveliest of Scotland's hillsides. A brown burn rushed by the door. Great birds wheeled and whirred above the eaves. This woman almost worshiped the beauty of her homeland, and it touched her to see how much their strange guest saw and felt it. He saw even more of it than she did—though, fortunately for their mutual liking, she could not suspect that—and he felt it very much indeed. It reminded him of the country beside the Yangtze in the neighborhood of the Falls of Chung Shui.

One long vacation Wu and Muir climbed the Alps and the London papers reported Wu killed. But it was another Chinese, an undergraduate at Cambridge whose name was Ku, who had misstepped and slid down into the engulfing ice. But the mistake reached Oxford, and