His excitement rose at once.

He called loudly for his confederates--a band of inelegant infidels--and
bidding them stand one by one at given distances, he gaped at them
through the glasses with the hilarity of a schoolboy and the stupidity
of an owl. He jumped, he shouted, he waved his arms about me, and
handing them back to me with both hands, shouted deafeningly in my ear
that they were quite beyond his ken; and then he sucked his teeth
disgustingly and spat at my feet. His associates were speechless, asses
that they were, and could only stare, in horror or impudence I know not.

Meantime Lao Chang brought tea, and sallied forth immediately to
fraternize among old friends. As I drank my tea, after having invited
them one by one to join me, slowly and with a fitting dignity, the empty
stare, destitute of sense or sincerity, of these six upstanding Chinese
gentry, sucking at tobacco-pipes as long as their own overfed bodies,
forced upon me a sense of my unfitness for the unknown conditions of the
life of the place, a sense of loneliness and social unshelteredness in
the sterile waste of their fashionable life. They spoke to me
subsequently, and I bravely threw at them a Chinese phrase or two; but
when the conversation got above my head, I told them, quietly but
determinedly, that I could not understand, my English speech seemed
vaguely to indicate a sudden collapse of the acquaintance, the opening
of a gulf between us, destined to widen to the whole length and breadth
of Yang-kai, swallowing up their erstwhile confidences. One of them
facetiously remarked that the gentleman wished to eat his rice; and as
they cleared out, falling over each other and the high step at the
entrance to the room, I thought that no matter how old they are, Chinese
are but little children. But had I treated them as little children I
should have found that they were old men.

There was in me withal a sense of better rank in the eyes of this
super-excellent few who worshipped, in "heathen" China, the Satan of
Fashion. As a matter of fact, their rank had emerged from such long
centuries ago that it seemed to me to be so identified with them that
they were hardly capable of analysis of people such as myself. As I
looked pityingly upon them and the involved simplicity of their
immutable natures, I realized an unconquerable feeling of inborn rank
and natural elevation in respect to nationality. This is, however,
against my personal general conce