Hilda Gregory, walking beside her mother, quite a pretty girl seen by herself, seemed in the mother's wake rather than side by side, though far the more brightly clad, and was a dim afterglow of the matron's glory—as Low Soong, for all her gay apparel and own high coloring, standing a little apart, seemed too of Nang Ping's. And Florence Gregory looked as much Basil's sister as Hilda, who was a few years his junior.
A Chinese serving woman followed the Gregory ladies. She was palpably Mrs. Gregory's maid, and not Hilda's; why, it is impossible to say, unless because the mother was unmistakably of the woman-type to which servants and dogs attach themselves, that claims them, and to which they belong. Hilda Gregory probably played tennis and golf better than her mother, and plied a more useful needle; but she buttoned her own boots as naturally as it came to the mother to lean well back at ease against down cushions and have her hair brushed by a servant. Ah Wong, the amah, carried a closed parasol, a costly European thing of lace and mother-o'-pearl, that would have suited Miss Gregory's rose crêpe quite as well as it did Mrs. Gregory's silver ninon; but the sturdy Chinese figure, plainly clad in dark blue cotton, was unmistakably in attendance on the mother.
There were six here now, not counting the Wu servants moving on the outskirts of the group, silent and busied. But Mrs. Gregory and Wu Nang Ping held the stage: English womanhood and Chinese something at their best.
They made a great contrast than which the old beauty-packed garden had seen nothing prettier: two living, sentient expressions of womanhood, greatly different, greatly alike.
