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Updated: June 27, 2025
"The willow-leaves will bud soon," answered Dong-Yung, glancing over her shoulder at the tapering, yellowing twigs of the ancient tree. "And the beech-blossoms," continued Foh-Kyung. "'The earth is the Lord's, and the fullness thereof." "The foreign devil's wisdom," answered Dong-Yung. "It is greater than ours, Dong-Yung; greater and lovelier.
It was all very strange and ugly. Perhaps it was a garden, but no one would have guessed it. Dong-Yung longed to put each flower plant in a dragon bowl by itself and place it where the sun caught its petals one by one as the hours flew by. She longed for a narrow, tile-edged patch to guide her feet through all that flat green expanse. A little shiver ran over her.
"Do not think fearful things, little Princess," he whispered. "Enter, and be not afraid. There is no fear in the worship of Jesus." So Dong-Yung crossed the threshold first. Something caught her breath away, just as the chanting of the dragon priests always did. She took a few steps forward and stood behind a low-backed bench.
The floors were wide open, and Dong-Yung saw the decorous rows of square chairs and square tables set rhythmically along the walls, and the covered dais at the head for the guest of honour. Long crimson scrolls, sprawled with gold ideographs, hung from ceiling to floor.
May she eat bitterness all her days!" The amah shouldered the steaming buckets and splashed across the bare boards of the ancestral hall beyond. "The great wife is angry," murmured the gate-keeper. "Oh, Honourable One, shall I admit the flower-girl? She has fresh orchids." Dong-Yung nodded. The flower girl came slowly in under the guarded gateway.
"And so we have come, even as the foreign-born God tells us, a man and his wife, to believe the Jesus way." Foh-Kyung spoke in a low voice, but his face smiled. Dong-Yung smiled, too, at his open, triumphant declarations. She said over his words to herself, under her breath, so that she would remember them surely when she wanted to call them back to whisper to her heart in the dark of some night.
"Give me thy hand and look up with thine eyes and thy heart." Dong-Yung touched his hand. Foh-Kyung looked up as if he saw into the ether beyond, and there saw a spirit vision of ineffable radiance. But Dong-Yung watched him. She saw him transfigured with an inner light. His eyes moved in prayer.
With that curious democracy of China, where high and low alike are friendly, Dong-Yung hurried into her beloved kitchen. "Has the master come?" asked the serving maid. "Coming, coming," Dong-Yung answered, "I myself will take in his morning rice, after I have offered the morning oblations to the gods." Dong-Yung selected two of the daintiest blue-and-white rice-pattern bowls.
Foh-Kyung took a silken and ivory fan from an inner pocket and spread it in the air. Dong-Yung knew the fan well. It came from a famous jeweller's on Nanking Road, and had been designed by an old court poet of long ago. The tiny ivory spokes were fretted like ivy-twigs in the North, but on the leaves of silk was painted a love-story of the South.
"It has not been heard of in the Middle Kingdom for a woman to eat with a man." "Nevertheless, it shall be. Come!" Dong-Yung entered slowly. The light in this dim room was all gathered upon the person of Foh-Kyung, in the gleaming patterned roses of his gown, in his deep amethyst ring, in his eyes. Dong-Yung came because of his eyes.
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