She had quite a number of English friends in Hong Kong and at Sha-mien. The English thought her great fun, and she was eagerly sociable. And English merchants, anxious to conciliate the powerful Wu, encouraged their womenkind to friendliness with his kinswoman. But she longed for friends of her own race; and except Nang and Wu she had none. She longed for cronies, and she had not one, except the Taoist abbess.
Strange that a people so implacable to comforted and comfortable widowhood should be ruled by a widow! But so it is. And, after all, the Chinese race has a right to its share of human inconsistency. Tze-Shi was an Empress, the mother of a son, and had a great personality. Sing Kung Yah had been born a long way from the imperial yellow, was childless, and had little personality of her own. And so Nang Ping, in the sweetest way, had run a little wild, as roses and honeysuckle do, and so the frequent visits—that were something of a skurrying too—to the Taoist convent on the hills.
The Wus were not Taoists, strictly. Like most Chinese of their class, they mingled a loyal observance of the rites of all three of the great Chinese sects and an anxious acceptance of their tripled superstitions, with an easy and respectful contempt for them all—certainly for all except the Confucianism that has made and welded China for twenty-five centuries, but that every Chinese of half Wu's intelligence knows is, in fact, a magnificent irreligion, a philosophy, a patriotism, but no God-cult.
In her aunt's absence, as well as her father's, Nang Ping was absolutely mistress of herself and of all in her father's house. When she left Basil Gregory she had closed the door panel of her own room, hanging a purple scarf in its outer carving, and no one, not even Low Soong, dared disregard the imperative silken signal that
