satins. He was sincerely indifferent to it. When English urchins called after him, "Chin-chin Chinaman, chop, chop, chop," he did not care a whit. Partly this was good-nature—for he was good-natured as yet—and partly it was vanity: the centuries-old vanity of a descendant of an interminable mandarinate. He understood how immeasurably superior he was to those who presumed to laugh at him—how much better clad, how much better bred—and tolerated them and their peasant mirth very much in the spirit of the old fellow in Æsop's fable who scorned to resent the kicks his donkey gave him because he "considered the source," and with, too, the quiet pride of the MacGregor who, when his acquaintance expressed surprise that the great "Mac" had been seated below the salt at some feast, asserted with bland arrogance, "Where MacGregor sits is the head of the table." But to be shorn of the cue and stripped of the finery at which the canaille jeered maddened him and made him very bitter.
In ten years the Chinese in exile made many acquaintances, but only one friend. Probably he filched some profit, some equipment for his years to come, from each of the acquaintances; but, for all that, he found most of them no small nuisance. A Mrs. Cholmondeley-Piggot was his infliction in chief. She was a distant connection of the blond attaché's mother, and had gone to school with a second or third cousin of Sir Halliday Macartney. And she had no doubt that those two facts, by the strength and the charm of their union, made her persona grata at the Chinese Legation. She called there at the oddest times, and dropped in to lunch uninvited; and the Chinese Minister, trained from his birth to make great and chivalrous allowance for the vagaries of women and of lunatics, would not permit his exasperated
