Page:Alien Souls by Achmed Abdullah (1922).djvu/247

the negative test; the test of suffering and unfulfilled desire; the test of acrid memory. "Memory," he would say to himself, over and over again, patiently, defiantly, almost belligerently, when the thought of his wife's narrow, pleasurable hands rose flush with the tide of his regrets and, by the same token, caused his tao once more to dim and fade—"memory, which is of the dirt-clouted body, and not of the soul."

Yet in the matter of acrid memory and unfulfilled desire Miss Edith Rutter, the social-settlement investigator who specialized in the gliding vagaries of the Mongol mind as exemplified in Pell Street, had brought back at the time an entirely different tale, an entirely different interpretation of Chinese philosophy, too.

But be it remembered that philosophy is somewhat affected by surroundings, and that Miss Rutter had been on a visit to an aunt of hers in Albany, balancing a Jasper ware tea-cup and cake-plate on a scrawny, black-taffeta-covered knee, and, about her, tired, threadbare furnishings that harped back to the days of rep curtains, horsehair chaise-longues, wax fruit, shell ornaments, banjo clocks, pictures of unlikely children playing with improbable dogs, cases of polished cornelian, levant-bound sets of Ouida, and unflinching, uncompromising Protestant Christianity.

"My dear," she had said to Aunt Eliza Jane, "the more I see of these Chinamen, the less I understand them. This man I told you about, Mr. Li Ping-Yeng—oh, a most charming, cultured gentleman, I assure you, with such grand manners!—I saw him a few minutes after they brought home the poor crushed little body of his young bride, his two days bride, and, my dear,—would you believe it possible?—there wasn't a tear in his eyes, his hands didn't even tremble. And