Page:Alien Souls by Achmed Abdullah (1922).djvu/248

when I spoke to him, tactful, gentle, consoling words, what do you imagine he replied?"

"I've no idea."

"He smiled! Yes, indeed, smiled! And he said something—I forget the exact words—about his having, perhaps, loved too much, his having perhaps been untrue to his inner self. I can't understand their philosophy. It is—oh—so inhuman!" She had puzzled. "How can anybody love too much? What can he have meant by his inner self?"

"Pah! heathens!" Aunt Eliza Jane had commented resolutely. "Have another cup of tea?"

Thus the judgment of the whites; and it was further crystallized in detective Bill Devoy's rather more brutal: "Say, them Chinks has got about as much feelings as a snake has hips. No noives—no noives at all, see?" and Mr. Brian Neill, the Bowery saloon-keeper's succinct: "Sure, Mike. I hates all them yeller swine. They gives me the bloody creeps."

Still, it is a moot point who is right, the Oriental, to whom love is less a sweeping passion than the result of a delicate, personal balancing on the scales of fate, or the Occidental, to whom love is a hectic, unthinking ecstasy, though, given his racial inhibitions, often canopied in the gilt buckram of stiffly emotional sex-romanticism.

At all events, even the humblest, earthliest coolie between Pell and Mott had understood when, the day after his wife's death, Li Ping-Yeng had turned to the assembled company in the back room of the Great Shanghai Chop Suey Palace, which was for yellow men only and bore the euphonic appellation, "The Honorable Pavilion of Tranquil Longevity," and had said:

"The ancients are right. One must preserve a proper