She wondered what this name he most liked sounded like. She’d ask Charles to read it aloud to her. Probably Charlie didn’t pronounce Chinese with impeccable Chinese accent, but she knew that he spoke that language—or had spoken it some years ago—and no doubt he could read it a little. She’d like to hear how that funny looking little name sounded. It must be a short name—with just one character—that was what they called them, she thought—in its writing: a chubby little name, if its “character” at all depicted it—but neither unpretty nor ungraceful, for delicate curves—almost hair-lines one or two—crossed and jutted out daintily from its fat thicker sweeps of the brush. How unlike English writing this Chinese writing was! Strange that inked makeshifts for spoken words, so unlike as these that Mr. Sên had written in Chinese and those he’d written in English were, could stand for the same things, convey the same meanings! But did they? Were Chinese thoughts and English—hearts, minds, emotions—in anyway one? The man she had ridden with the other day had seemed so little un-English to her! And he had found her a little Chinese—that first night at Miss Julia’s. Could hands of the West and hands of the East meet now and then, after all, in grip not altogether Eurasian and flabby? How interesting it all was! And she’d never given it a thought before! How full of wonderful things the world was—and life!
She stretched comfortably up on her pillows, and gathered a mass of the exquisite flowers up to her face. Her soft hair lay loose about her, clouding the cambric and torchon of her pretty nightgown, perfuming her hair and her dimpled chin. Like all women who care for clothes in the nicest way, care for the sense of soft fabric on soft skin, for the beauty of texture and tint and line, for the clothes for the sake of the reflection they give of a personal daintiness and taste, and not for what they “show,” Ivy, obliged to skimp, skimped on outer garments that others saw, rather than on those that only she and her mirror ever saw, those that touched her intimately. Being young and raw she often was ashamed of coat and skirt, or of dance frock less fresh and good than were those of other girls, but she would have felt a grosser shame to put coarse, roughly-trimmed calico against her skin, which being sensible and not blind, she knew deserved its first sheath of covering to be as nearly delicate as loom and needle could contrive. It was a very pretty nightgown.