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Updated: May 31, 2025
Taou Yuen, his wife, was standing in the middle of the floor, gazing about with a faint and polite smile. Her eyes rested on a yellow camphor chest one of the set brought home by his father on a severe high range of drawers made of sycamore with six legs, on her brilliant reflection in the eagle-crowned mirror above the mantel, and the sleigh bed with low heavily curved ends.
Examining this natural conclusion, Gerrit was surprised, startled, to find that it was no longer true. For the first time in his memory he was not anxious to be under sail. This of course was caused by a natural perplexity about Taou Yuen's comfort and happiness. "I don't know what the firm's plans are for me," he answered cautiously.
Fragments of news came to him quoted and re-quoted, grotesquely exaggerated and even malicious reports of the tragedy at the Dunsacks'. Standing at his high desk in the countingroom of the Mongolian Marine Insurance Company, Taou Yuen's glittering passage through Salem already seemed to him a fable, a dream.
Hergesheimer, like Poe before him, inclines very definitely toward beauty rather than toward humanity, where distinctions may be drawn between them. In Linda Condon, however, his most remarkable creation, he has brought humanity and beauty together in an intimate fusion. Less exotic than Taou Yuen, Linda, with her straight black bang and her extravagant simplicity of taste, is no less exquisite.
He told me very calmly that he would like to avoid this. "Then, in the linguist's most flowery manner, they went on with what Lu Kikwang proposed. He had recognized that I was a man of 'superior propriety' and he wondered if I would take Taou Yuen away to America with me. Very secretly though there would be an uproar if it were known that a Manchu woman had been married to a foreigner.
If he only understood the three religions of China, if he were an intellectual man, Gerrit realized, he could have grasped his wife more fully. He was completely ignorant of Chinese history, of all the forces that had united to form Taou Yuen.
He raised his bony arms the wide silk sleeves falling back his emaciated yellow hands. From under his dark eyelids there was a glitter of vision like the sheen on mica... Taou Yuen floated nearer. Edward Dunsack woke suddenly, at the darkest ebb of night, and started hurriedly to his feet. A sickening vertigo, a whirling head, sent him lurching across the room.
She smiled obediently at his announcement, and, with a fan of peacock silks and betel nuts in a pouch like a tea rose hanging by a cord from a jade button, she signified her readiness to proceed. William had gone on foot with his girls, Jeremy was seldom in church, and Rhoda, Taou Yuen beside her with Gerrit facing them, followed in the barouche.
"Taou Yuen," he continued, "you miss Shanghai, with the wall of ten gates and the river Woosung stuck full of masts. You'll never think Salem is a paradise like Soochow." "This is your city," she replied, slowly choosing the words. "Your ancestors are here." There was not a shade of regret in her voice or manner.
She was lost in her aloofness from mundane affairs: Taou Yuen in whispering silk, her grandfather's rotund tones, Laurel and Camilla and her mother, were distant, immaterial. In the evening she sat on the front steps, a web of white, dreamily intent on the shimmering sweep of Washington Square. After a little she was joined by Gerrit Ammidon.
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