Short Stories
which meant that he was heathen. Their Christianity was to him
so much nonsense. But all this he would have ignored as extra-
neous and irrelevant, could he have but understood the young
people themselves. When Maud, for instance, told him that the
housekeeping bills for the month were thirty thousand—that he
understood, as he understood Albert's request for five thousand
with which to buy the schooner yacht Muriel and become a
member of the Hawaiian Yacht Club. But it was their remoter,
complicated desires and mental processes that obfuscated him.
He was not slow in learning that the mind of each son and
daughter was a secret labyrinth which he could never hope to
tread. Always he came upon the wall that divides East from
West. Their souls were inaccessible to him, and by the same to-
ken he knew that his soul was inaccessible to them.
Besides, as the years came upon him, he found himself hark-
ing back more and more to his own kind. The reeking smells of
the Chinese quarter were spicy to him. He sniffed them with sat-
isfaction as he passed along the street, for in his mind they car-
ried him back to the narrow tortuous alleys of Canton swarming
with life and movement. He regretted that he had cut off his
queue to please Stella Allendale in the prenuptial days, and he
seriously considered the advisability of shaving his crown and
growing a new one. The dishes his highly paid chef concocted
for him failed to tickle his reminiscent palate in the way that the
weird messes did in the stuffy restaurant down in the Chinese
quarter. He enjoyed vastly more a half-hour's smoke and chat
with two or three Chinese chums, than to preside at the lavish
and elegant dinners for which his bungalow was famed, where
the pick of the Americans and Europeans sat at the long table,
men and women on equality, the women with jewels that blazed
in the subdued light against white necks and arms, the men
237