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Updated: June 25, 2025
He wanted to ask a thousand questions, but he knew that even if the Ammidons were too dense to grasp his curiosity, Taou Yuen herself would comprehend his impoliteness. Nowhere else could be found the wisdom and poise of a Manchu lady. Jeremy Ammidon, in a lawn chair, a smoking cheroot in his fingers, asked him about affairs of Chinese government and commerce.
The mate grasped a top maul and struck the trigger of the ring stopper a clean blow, the anchor splashed into the water with a rumbling cable, and the Nautilus was home. Gerrit Ammidon walked hurriedly to the companionway and went below, while the mate continued, "Stand by to let go your topsail halliards and man the gear.
Seated on the bench that circled the interior of the latticed summerhouse she moved so that he could no longer see her face. Brevard was beside her, talking in a low amused voice: there was a ringing peal of laughter from Sidsall Ammidon and a faint infinitely well-bred ripple from Taou Yuen. The brilliant patch of her gown made an extraordinary effect in the Salem garden.
They stopped before her in an assured, not unkindly inquisitiveness, the girls fresh and bright-faced, with crisp lovely clothes; their mother, in a smart mantle and little bonnet with knots of French flowers, greeted her with a direct question tempered by a smile. William Ammidon, smoking, was unconcerned; while Gerrit stayed obscured outside the group. "Whom are you with, Nettie?"
He was inexpressibly weary of the struggle always racking his being: it seemed to him that in the midst of a serene world he was tormented by some inimicable and fatal power. He fastened his thoughts on commonplace happier objects, on the page under his hand, the entries of Medford rum and sugar cane and molasses, and the infinitely larger affairs of Ammidon, Ammidon and Saltonstone.
An American would have betrayed something of her reaction to him, he could have discovered a trace, an indication, of her thoughts; but the Manchu's face was as inscrutable as porcelain. William Ammidon nodded, the old man responded to his leave-taking with a degree of warmness, Gerrit at least smiled in a not unfriendly manner. Edward Dunsack bowed to Taou Yuen, and she gravely inclined her head.
All the vivid scenes that continually formed and shifted in his mind gathered about Gerrit Ammidon's wife. He used this phrase in a contemptuously satirical manner: it was impossible for Ammidon actually to marry a Manchu. Such racial mating, he told himself, could not be consummated; there were too many deep antipathies of flesh and spirit; the man was too too stupidly normal.
There Nettie found herself beside a little girl clasping the hand of a bulky old gentleman in pongee and a palm leaf hat and following every operation with a grave critical regard. "I guess," she said to her companion, "it's only the cheap sort of tea, a late picking, or it would be in canisters." She was, Nettie realized, the youngest Ammidon child with her grand-father.
The thought of Gerritt Ammidon, with all the other deeper aspects of her life, was thrust into the back of her consciousness; she was existing as she breathed without will; the instinctive lighter qualities had her in full possession. She felt that her cheeks were glowing and hummed the refrains of the music she had heard. One by one the military companies marched into the Square.
It was written in the beginning, and we had been drawing together through a million cycles before Gerrit Ammidon stumbled across you." Taou Yuen was surprised by a sudden conviction that a part of this, at least, was so.
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