by courting, winning (and meriting) the dislike of Indian and Chinese women. The Englishwoman does it not by any overt act or series of acts, but by a consistent supercilious contemptuousness of attitude. I am a mem-*sahib. You do not exist. The secret societies—the tongs and the brotherhoods—are responsible for much of our Asiatic difficulties; our own women are responsible for more. If the Boxers made Pekin run red with European blood, some women of the European Legations did even more to bring down the trouble and to foment it.
And the pity of it is its absolute unnecessariness: just a cup of cold water now and then, just a little human kindliness now and then, and the liking and sympathy of Oriental womanhood were ours. Some one has written of "the heart that must beat somewhere beneath the impenetrable Oriental mask." The mask is not impenetrable. An honest, friendly smile will pierce it. The Oriental is nine-tenths heart. A typical Asiatic can be won by moderate kindness to great loyalty and devotion. Page after page of the history of the Indian mutiny proves it.
And of the Chinese people this is even truer.
Florence Gregory was a kindly, likeable woman, and during her year in Hong Kong she had not thought it necessary to make herself detestable to the Chinese with whom she came in contact.
On her part this was neither tact nor studied policy. They interested her and she liked them, and in return they liked her. She gave them courtesy and decent treatment, and sometimes a sunny word or two, and in return they gave her of their best and served her loyally. Ah Wong, her amah, adored her.
There was nothing that Ah Wong would not have done for her English mistress. And the story of it is
