"Finding that I had mastered something, I proceeded to forget it. That means that the processes began to work automatically. I had learned to think in Chinese—that’s the truth—so much so that the English and American training I had known began to take on the same sense of distance and novelty that they would from the standpoint of a cosmopolitan Chinese. For instance, you and the yellow rug—even before you spoke, appeared to me in a kind of haze of romance—"
He smiled at her. Romney was himself for the first time in her presence because he saw that his story was making her incline to him pleasantly.
"Meanwhile," he added, "I had ceased to be a boy in certain ways, and I had come into a bodily health and strength that I never knew as a boy. I had learned to wait and I had learned how to laugh—"
Then Romney realized—perhaps it was something of premonition—that what he said was not quite as exact as it would have been before meeting her.
"Perhaps it is too much," he replied quickly. "I would have said it without qualification before—before yesterday. I only mean in men-matters. Perhaps I have to learn how to wait and how to laugh all over again in the things that are nearer the heart. I was only talking about the pressures that the world put on a man. Perhaps I have not put away boyish things that pertain to a man’s relation with women, his woman. That’s an arcanum to me—"
"Arcanums call you, don’t they, Sir Romney?" she asked.
He saw the gleam of her eyes and teeth in the purple dusk.
"Something as they call you, I think. I have never known the sheer excitement of a human presence such as you have brought to me. It’s because I can lose myself in you. China has a new atmosphere when I’m with you—"
Her voice came lingeringly to him. "You are not so young as I thought," she went on. "And yet you are young. You are still preparing, and yet you have passed the multitudes of men—oh, so far."
"Presently I began to see the new birth of China. It became clearer and clearer as I learned more of the native mind. Now that I think of it, this new birth which is not yet consummated, is like the gray glistening moth of your Irish house that lay in the desk through the long winter. All that the usual white man sees, even now, is the weathered rusty chrysalis of the old, but I see the wings. They are still pinned. The body is moist and craving, but it looks great and good to me. I met some of the young men who are ready to give their lives for it—a kind of inspired group of young men, like Hugo’s group that nearly became famous.