own family did not guess it. He
saw that there was no place for him amongst this marvellous seed of his
loins, and he looked forward to his declining years and knew that he
would grow more and more alien. He did not understand his children.
Their conversation was of things that did not interest him and about
which he knew nothing. The culture of the West had passed him by. He
was Asiatic to the last fibre, which meant that he was heathen. Their
Christianity was to him so much nonsense. But all this he would have
ignored as extraneous and irrelevant, could he have but understood the
young people themselves. When Maud, for instance, told him that the
housekeeping bills for the month were thirty thousand--that he
understood, as he understood Albert's request for five thousand with
which to buy the schooner yacht _Muriel_ and become a member of the
Hawaiian Yacht Club. But it was their remoter, complicated desires and
mental processes that obfuscated him. He was not slow in learning that
the mind of each son and daughter was a secret labyrinth which he could
never hope to tread. Always he came upon the wall that divides East from
West. Their souls were inaccessible to him, and by the same token he
knew that his soul was inaccessible to them.

Besides, as the years came upon him, he found himself harking back more
and more to his own kind. The reeking smells of the Chinese quarter were
spicy to him. He sniffed them with satisfaction as he passed along the
street, for in his mind they carried him back to the narrow tortuous
alleys of Canton swarming with life and movement. He regretted that he
had cut off his queue to please Stella Allendale in the prenuptial days,
and he seriously considered the advisability of shaving his crown and
growing a new one. The dishes his highly paid chef concocted for him
failed to tickle his reminiscent palate in the way that the weird messes
did in the stuffy restaurant down in the Chinese quarter. He enjoyed
vastly more a half-hour's smoke and chat with two or three Chinese chums,
than to preside at the lavish and elegant dinners for which his bungalow
was famed, where the pick of the Americans and Europeans sat at the long
table, men and women on equality, the women with jewels that blazed in
the subdued light against white necks and arms, the men in evening dress,
and all chattering and laughing over topics and witticisms that, while
they were not exactly Greek to him, did not