"Don't you think, if only on baby's account, it had better be put in the fire? I shouldn't want stray millinery in the house."

"Of course." Clara started off at once -for the kitchen quarters, no doubt.

"Oh, you women!" groaned Ellis. "What's wrong with a flower? And it's the cook, not the nurse. I'm sure she loved it. She doesn't know where it came from. I tell you it was gorgeous." My calm was shattered. "Ellis Peele, it was a horror!"

He turned on me a face of wonder. "'Twasn't! But how in the world do you know?"

Clara, on the threshold, saved me. "Why, Ellis, of course it would have been -the kind of woman you say she was. Anyhow, we won't have it about. Men have no sense. If you gave it to the cook, she might think she ought to use it. And she often shakes her hats at baby and lets him pull the flowers."

She disappeared. For the first time in my life, I was grateful to Clara's particular weakness, which amounted to a hygienic muddle of wild apprehensions and even wilder precautions. I wasn't sure she wouldn't disinfect the cook before returning. For my part, Heaven knew, I was quite willing she should.

"Flowers!" It was a welcome cue to Ellis. "Insects, birds, fruits, trees! I assure you, bees and cats and all sorts of woodland creatures follow her bonnets home from church. The woman's a park!"

I laughed a little, very badly. But I admitted to myself that chance, having that day crushed me, was now staying its hand. Their mere foolishness had saved me from giving myself away. I hoped it was an omen. Still, I did not care to look out again across the water-just then. Clara returned, and I rose, a little waveringly, to go up-stairs.

"Well, is the holocaust over?" Ellis jeered.

"All over. silly?"

How could you be so

Ellis raised his hands to heaven. "It's lucky the woman didn't leave anything I might have handed over to baby. doll, for example."

I think Clara turned on him then.

A

I

heard: "Ellis, you never would." But at that point I fainted. I remember nothing about the swoon, of course—not even feeling ill before I fell. But they said I went down quite gently and limply. I fancy I was simply very tired of coincidences.

They kept me in bed for a few days, and must have given me heart stimulants and such, for I began to plot and plan very lucidly before I was allowed to get up. The events that I have enumerated had, by that time, arranged themselves neatly and vividly in my memory-no more detail, and no less, than what I have told you. My recollections of that day have never sifted themselves further. I remember, as I remembered then, everything I have set down here, and nothing more.

Several things were quite clear to me, before I came down-stairs. The first was that I must get away as soon as possible. I could not take drives in their motor; I could not go along the wood-road back and forth to Worden. That way lay hysteria, if not something worse. I could even see myself scratching and digging in the woods, round about a certain spot, wherever the sodden leaves had been disturbed. . . . I might not be able to avoid driving with Ellis and Clara to the station when I left; but I would sit with him, on however fantastic a pretext. Nothing-not if I died for it-would drag me into the tonneau. Yes, I must go at once, and I invented a specialist— in Boston. That took a little thinking, as well as, later, a good deal of lying; for life seldom took me to Boston, and the Peeles knew it. But it was perfectly clear to me as clear as an axiom or two times five-that I could not take any train that would deposit me in the Grand Central station. I was very hard hit, you see, from the first; and living in the house with a good citizen would never make it better. From Boston, I remembered, a blessed through train curved down somehow to Washington, and I could get back to New York by railroads that, in those days, ended weakly in ferries. The hypothetical specialist in Boston could tell me a lot of interesting things about myself that I could neatly summarize in letters. My further plan was to get out of the country before I really needed to consult a specialist. Then,

when I did have to, it could be a Frenchman. I knew the kind of question they put to you when your nerves are shot to pieces, and I could almost imagine myself, at need, telling my story to a Frenchman. You can see what I mean. Thank Heaven, I've never had to; the wide world has set me up again.

I followed my programme, got through it all successfully and plausibly. There was not a hitch. The baby, even, one day, ran a temperature, so that I could go down alone to the water and drown my novel. So smoothly did my mind work-now that I could no longer consider myself a moral creature; it hadn't worked smoothly while I still had my chance that I led up cannily, for some hours, to the geste of borrowing Clara's blue glasses for the unavoidable last drive to Worden. They were an immense help. Clara sat behind with the portmanteaux. I was sorry for her, in spite of her ignorance; but, even could I have afforded it, there was not a pretext, in heaven or earth, for giving them a new car. And at least, I reflected, as we crunched along through the unchanging mud, it-the wax doll, I mean-had never been in the car.

That is really all. For I told you in the beginning what my life has been since that day. And, pray, do not think that I do not like my life, even though I seem to myself to be the only person in the world to know what whiteness can mean. I have times (on my worst days) of addressing myself in the cold terms of "accessory after the fact"; yes. But I have times, too, of thinking that if I had given her away, I should have loathed myself forever. Those are the days when the face comes back to me, and on the whole, you know, they are the best-except for the days when some miracle of height or valley or builded house so intervenes that I forget it all. I have occasionally a desire, so intense that it burns my mind, to know what a good citizen would think of me. But I know, too, what the desire is worth; for Ellis Peele is a good citizennone better and I was at exceeding pains not to ask him. I was wrong, by the way, just now, about my worst days. My worst days-but they come very seldom, for I'm in the main a sane creature -are those when I tell myself, in all sincerity, that I have no scrap of real proof that it wasn't a wax doll.

CCOMPANIED by the tail end of the winter of 1913, Henri Baldeau reached Liao Shan-a big man and thick, with a crisp beard that crinkled away from his chin, and black hair that seemed in eager haste to curl back from his forehead. To his head clung a battered yachting-cap of serge, in his buttonhole drooped a ribbon, red in hue, and he favored his left foot as he walked. A proud man was Baldeau, and happy, for his dream had stretched. into the day: half-way round the world again stood Carentan in Normandy, and in Carentan was Aude, better than bread, who waited for him to amass the dowry that must equal her own and the money for her passage to the East. And his great opportunity had now come, after the years in Saigon, where the regiment had left him when it sailed for home, left him with a jingal-ball in his ankle-bonethere had been troubles on the border and the ribbon the slug had earned him on his breast.

His argosy came to him with the spring break-up of the river four weeks later. She was a squatty cargo-boat, with ruststreaked sides, and Ta Tu-tzu-The Big Belly-writ large in Chinese characters upon her waist. Around thin and towering funnel ran three bands, red and white and blue, and to him, Baldeau-next to Aude, it is understood-she was the most beautiful thing in the world.

Feverishly he crammed the hold that gave her name with the brown bean-cake, and he sent her out to sea again, her engines thumping like the hammer of a tired iron founder, down the coast to Shanghai, a thousand miles away. It was three weeks later that she came back to him, and every three weeks after that. And on each return Baldeau's section of wharfage on the long stretch of gravelled bund would swarm with the half-naked, coppercolored coolies as they rushed the beans

through the loading ports. And Baldeau rejoiced in it all, in the hum and bustle of his wharf, in the matronly figure of the Ta Tu-tzu-above all, in the fifty dollars Mexican that remained to him clear after each visit of his ship. There were compensations, he reflected, grand compensations. The dot grew here, grew faster than in Saigon, and one did not miss the street of Catinat, and Jacques and Pierre and Paul; that is to say, one did not miss them too much.

And then it was that he began to realize that he did miss them, all of them. It had been pleasant in the evenings down there, in front of the Café des Étrangers, with the palms whispering above one, and his apéritif placed there, ready for the sipping, on the white table-top. Yes, it had been pleasant and different from the club here. For Baldeau did not appreciate the club. What they said and thought and drank there was not as the traffickings of the street of Catinat. And it was dear, that club. So he did not like it, nor did he return there. One preferred to be alone-yes, alone.

And then, as he tried to swallow down the bitterness of the solitude, a way out came to him. It was late in a May afternoon, just after the Ta Tu-tzu had slouched off down the river, that he discovered Julius Rentloff discoursing bitterly to his -Baldeau's-compradore on the non-arrival of certain bales of German blankets, the bills of lading for which he flourished regularly under the compradore's impassive nose. A tall man was Rentloff and thin, with quick, bird-like movements, and a narrow, bird-like nose, under which dwelt the perpetual shadow of a scanty mustache. Baldeau knew him as a neighbor of his, for the German dwelt a short fifty yards from his house. Hastily he offered condolences and amends, all in the commercial tongue of the coast, which is to say, English. The blankets were probably mislaid. And meanwhile, if there were

temporary embarrassment, or if, in fine, the blankets had failed to come as billed, he, Henri Baldeau, agent for the FrancoChinese Company of the Packet Boats, would be glad to offer reparation as he now offered his sympathies and his regrets. And should they now go home?

Rentloff looked at him. Then, appeased and a little surprised, he spoke:

"These men, your friends at the club, and their wives-they do not like to see you in company with me." There was not the least trace of resentment in his voice. He might have been retailing trade statistics.

"These gentlemen-hein," replied Baldeau, and they swung out of the office together. Saying little, filled with the embarrassment of sincerity, they journeyed away from the water-front until they paused before Rentloff's house, built out of mud from the brown plain on which it stood, its windows brightened by shutters of red. Here Rentloff stopped and cleared his throat gutturally..

"Would you would you stop to eat?" you-would he finally put forth.

"But yes!" cried Baldeau, remembering his silent home with its reek of stale tobacco and its silent rooms that seemed to spread around for miles. And he repeated it eagerly: "But yes!"

They dined in Rentloff's garden, on opposite sides of a little round table hung in spotless white. And as the dusk crept up in the sky the tangle of vines around them unfurled great blemishless moonflowers, all in white, that drowned out with their odor the pungent smell of the stumpy tamarisk-trees. And in the pond of a near-by brick-kiln the frogs turned from songs of complaint to lullabys. The two men ate slowly, luxuriously, the volume of their talk increasing between the leisurely mouthfuls, but with great appraising silences still intervening. A woman served them, her hair drawn taut over the frame of her head-dress, her short robe swishing amid the vines.

At first Baldeau had started at being waited on by other than a man. Still, he thought, one could understand it. This was the why, he felt, of Rentloff's warning as to the social danger he would run in his company. And then vaguely he began to wonder anew. Who was this man with

his great calm and his measured speech? Why did he never mention his native Bavaria? How did he reconcile the Goethe and the Sudermann that he quoted so glibly and translated into English for his, Henri Baldeau's, benefit, how did he reconcile them, and his Herbert Spencer and his Bernard Shaw, with the placid-faced woman that served them? Dully Baldeau wondered, and with the wonderment there crept over him the assurance that this man of the slow, rumbling voice must always be his friend, whatever be the keynote of his life. And he breathed the certainty in with great, body-filling breaths.

The climax of it all came at the meal's end. Without a word the woman took her stand a little to the right of Rentloff's chair-expectant. The German looked at her for an instant, rose, hesitated once again, and then kissed her, kissed her full on the lips. Baldeau made a quick movement of repulsion, then relapsed into the tolerant taciturnity of the East. With all his knowledge of the strange ways in which matters are compounded along the Yellow Seas, never before had he seen nor heard of a native woman being kissed. At last he raised his eyes. Rentloff was in his seat again and the woman was gone.

"That," stated the Bavarian, "that is a mistake." And he went on, with neither pride nor regret in his voice. "I shall tell you. I am come here eight years ago. I am young and proud, and—and there is a maiden in my homeland. But I do not like it here; the man I do not understand; I am alone, full of the Heimweh-the nostalgia-and I am alone. So-I am very foolish-I get me this woman. She is called Ying Hua. There is my mistake. I treat her wie eine Dame-as a lady. Each night, as now, I kiss her; I kiss her on the lips. And then, then I learn my mistake. I cannot send for Minna. These, the ladies of the port, will not pay her calls. She will be alone, and I know that she cannot suffer it, this loneliness." His voice stopped, but only for an instant. "Also, I cannot send away Ying Huashe is used to being clean, to being kissed each night. Her family will not take her back. Also she cannot understand her family now. She will be alone. What can I do?" He relapsed into the vernacular: "Mei-yu fa-tzu."