TWO:Boy! humph! I frowned, made myself long, and confessed I had the honor to be from that city. Whereupon she let her long-lashed eyes take on as ravishing a covetousness as though I had been a pretty baby.
THREE:"Yes, you've secured a furlough.""I wonder," said the Curate, grasping the edge of his chair, "I wonder, now, if Moses felt like this when he saw the burning bush."
THREE:Shanghai is very prettily situated in a bend of the river, and the water-front is ornamented with a small park, which has a background of fine buildings. These buildings are handsome, and the most of them are large. Like the foreign residences at the treaty ports of Japan, they have a liberal allowance of ground, so that nearly every house fronting on the river has a neat yard or garden in front of it. The balconies are wide, and they are generally enclosed in lattice-work that allows a free circulation of air. Back from the water-front there are streets and squares for a long distance; and the farther you go from the river-front, the less do you find the foreign population, and the greater the Chinese one. The foreign quarter is divided into three sectionsAmerican, English, and Frenchand each has a front on the river in the order here given, but the subjects, or citizens, of each country are not confined to their own national quarter; several Americans live in the French and English sections, and there are French and English inhabitants in the quarter where the American consul has jurisdiction. There is generally the most complete harmony among[Pg 321] the nationalities, and they are accustomed to make common cause in any dispute with the Chinese. Sometimes they fall out; but they very soon become aware that disputes will be to their disadvantage, and proceed to fall in again. There is a great deal of social activity at Shanghai, and a vast amount of visiting and dinner-giving goes on in the course of a year.
THREE:And so I began to hear the tale. I was startled by its strong reminder of Charlotte's own life; but Charlotte answered my anxious glance with a brow so unfretted that I let the reading go on, and so made a cruel mistake. At every turning-point in the story its reader would have paused to talk it over, but Charlotte, with a steadily darkling brow, murmured each time "Go on," and I was silent, hoping that farther along there would be a better place to stop for good. Not so; the story's whirling flood swept us forward to a juncture ever drawing nearer and clearer, clearer and crueler, where a certain man would have to choose between the woman he loved and that breadth and fruitfulness of life to which his splendid gifts imperiously pointed him. Oh, you story-tellers! Every next page put the question plainer, drove the iron deeper: must a man, or even may a man, wed his love, when she stands between him and his truest career, a drawback and drag upon his finest service to his race and day? And, oh, me! who let my eye quail when Charlotte searched it, as though her own case had brought that question to me before ever we had seen this book. And, oh, that impenetrable woman reading! Her husband was in Lee's army, out of which, she boasted, she would steal him in a minute if she could. She was with us, now, only because, at whatever cost to others, she was going where no advancement of the enemy's lines could shut her off from him; and so stop reading a moment she must, to declare her choice for Love as against all the careers on earth, and to put that choice fairly to shame by the unworthiness of her pleadings in its defence. I intervened; I put her grovelling arguments aside and thrust better ones in, for the same choice, and then, in the fear that they were not enough, stumbled into special pleading and protested that the book itself had put the question unfairly.
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