A week later I received another letter from my two sisters. To my amazement I read the news that the younger of them had just become engaged to the single man who had arrived at the hill resort the day after the previous letter was written!
After I had partly recovered from the shock, my mind went back to what I had heard of the courtship of my married sister, also in China. The man who later became her husband was stationed at a place a thousand miles from where she was. They had been very slightly acquainted when they were in Bible institute in America, six or seven years before. Suddenly he started writing to her, and after two or three letters, asked her to marry him. When she went down to Shanghai for the wedding, practically all she knew of him was from his letters.
The other sister, who went with her at that time, told me later that when they went to the railway station in Shanghai to meet the expected groom, who did not arrive until the day after they did, she almost had heart failure. After they went to bed that night she could not go to sleep for thinking, "What if she shouldn't want to marry him, now that she's seen him! I'm sure _I_ wouldn't!"
Succeeding days set her mind at rest, however, for it was quite evident that the promised bride _did_ want to marry him--and so it turned out all right after all!
"What a strange family you come from!" you say. "Your sisters rush into marriage in such a precipitous way!"
No, not at all. Such courtships are fairly common among missionaries. The reason for this is obvious. There is very little opportunity on the mission field for becoming acquainted with eligible persons of the opposite sex. Unless the missionary is prepared to give up his calling in order to marry, his range of choice is necessarily limited to other missionaries; and missionaries, when at work, are usually widely scattered. Most of our mission stations had only one household, with only two, three, or four missionaries. Obviously, it would not be very likely that two single workers of opposite sex would be included in the group; to say nothing of the fact that such an allocation of workers would normally be considered highly unconventional! Usually single women workers were sent to one station, and a man (or men, if there were that many) to another. Missionary travel, except for going to a summer resort, was usually confined to one's own district, and missionaries working outside that district met very infrequently.