Now although he did not know it Yuan was as hot as any youth within, and hotter far than Sheng, who diffused his heart into a hundred pretty languors, and hotter, too, than Meng, who had his cause to burn for. And Yuan had come out of the cold courts of his childhood into this heated city. He who had never even touched a maid’s hand could not yet put his arm about a maid’s slight body and hold her hand in his with no rebuke, and feel her breath upon his cheek, and move her as he would to sounds of music, without the sweet sickness in him which he loved and feared. And though he was decorous, until Ai-lan teased him without pity, and he scarcely touched the hand he held, and never rested the maid’s body against his own, as many men were eager to do, and did it unreproved, too, still Ai-lan’s very teasing set his thoughts moving as they would not have dared to move and as he wished they would not.
She cried sometimes, pursing out her pretty lips, “Yuan, you are so old-fashioned! How can you dance well if you push the girl away from you like that? Look, this is the way to hold a maid!”
And there in the room where they all sat in the rare evenings when she was home with her mother, she set the music going in its box and she pressed herself into his arms and let her body follow all the lines of his, her feet weaving in and out with his. And she did not fail to tease him with the other maidens by, too, and she cried, laughing, if one were there, “If you would dance with my brother Yuan you must force him to hold you rightly. What he would like best would be to set you up against a wall somewhere and do his dancing all alone!” Or she would say. “Yuan, you are handsome, we all know, but not so fearfully handsome you need to fear every maid! Doubtless there are some of us who have our loves already set!”
And with such raillery before her friends she set them all to merriment so that bold maids grew bolder and pressed themselves against him shamelessly, and though he would have stopped their boldness he feared the sharp merriment of Ai-lan’s further speech, and bore it as he could. And even timid maids grew smiling when they danced with him and bolder than they were with bolder men, and they, too, added upturned eyes and smiles and warmer handclasps and the touch of thigh to thigh and all those wiles which women know by nature.
At last he grew so troubled by his dreams and all the freedom of the maids he knew for Ai-lan’s sake, that he would never have gone with her again except that the mother still said so often, “Yuan, it comforts me to know you are with Ai-lan; even though she has another man to take her where she goes, I feel the better if I know you are there, too.”
And Ai-lan was willing enough for Yuan to go with her, for she was proud to show him off, for he was a tall youth, and not ill to look at, and there were maids she knew to whom it was a favor that she brought him with her. Thus were the fires ready in Yuan against his will but he laid no torch to them.
Yet was the torch laid and in no way he could foresee, nor, indeed, that any could foresee.
And thus it was. One day Yuan lingered in the classroom to write down a foreign poem which his teacher had set upon the wall for a task, and he lingered until every other one was gone, or so he thought. It so happened that this was the class that he and Sheng sat together in, and also that pale maid who was a revolutionist. Now as Yuan finished what he wrote and closed his book and put his pen into his pocket and stirred himself to rise, he heard his name called and one spoke thus, “Mr. Wang, since you are here, will you explain to me the meaning of those lines set there? You are more clever than I am. I thank you if you will.”
This Yuan heard said in a very pleasing voice, a maid’s voice, but not tinkling with affectation as even Ai-lan’s voice was, or those of her friends. It was rather somewhat deep for any maid, very full and thrilling in its tone, so that any casual word it spoke seemed to take on more meaning than the mere word had. Yuan looked up in haste and great surprise, and there beside him stood that maid, the revolutionist, her pale face paler still than he remembered it, but now that she stood near him, he saw her dark narrow eyes were not cold at all but filled with inward warmth and feeling, and they belied the set coldness of her face, and burned there in its paleness. She looked at him steadfastly, and then with calmness set herself beside him and waited for him to answer, as cool as though she spoke on any day to any man.
He somehow answered, stammering while he did, “Ah, yes, of course — only I am not sure. I think it means — a foreign verse is always difficult — it is an ode — a sort of—” and so he stammered on, speaking something, somehow, and conscious always of her deep and steadfast look, now on his face, now on the words. And then she rose and thanked him, and again she spoke the simplest words and yet somehow her voice freighted them with a great load of gratitude, far more, Yuan thought, than any service could deserve. Then naturally they drew together as they left the room and walked together down the silent halls, for it was late afternoon and every student eager to be gone, and so they walked out to the gate and the maid seemed content to be silent until Yuan asked a thing or two for courtesy’s sake.
He asked, “What is your honored name?” and he asked in the old-fashioned courteous way he had been taught. But she answered crisply, the words short and curt seemingly, and without the return courtesy, except that voice of hers gave meaning to everything she said.
At last they reached the gate, and Yuan bowed deeply. But the maid gave a quick nod and went her way, and Yuan looking after her, saw her a little taller than most women as she walked sure and swift among the crowds until he lost her. Then he leaped wondering into a ricksha and went home, and he wondered what she really was, and wondered at the way her eyes and voice said other things than did her face and words.
On this slight beginning a friendship grew. Now Yuan had never had a maid for friend, nor in truth had he many friends, for he had not, as some did, a little special group in which he took a natural place. His cousins had their friends, Sheng his friends among young men like himself, who fancied they were the poets and the writers and the young painters of a modern day, and they followed zealously after leaders such as the one surnamed Wu, at whom Yuan glanced sidewise while he danced with Ai-lan. And Meng had his secret group of revolutionists. But Yuan belonged to none, and though he spoke to a score or so of young men as he passed them, and though he knew this maid or that of Ai-lan’s friends to talk lightly with a little while, he had no bosom friend. Before he knew it this maid came to be his friend.
And thus it came about. At first it was always she who pressed the friendship, coming as any wilier maid might do to ask his explanation or his advice on something or other, and he was deceived as all men easily are by even such simple wile as this, for after all he was a man and very young and it was pleasant to him to advise a maid, and he came to helping her to write her essays and at last it came about that with one excuse or another they met somehow every day, although not openly. For if any had asked Yuan what he felt for this maid he would have said he felt friendship only, nothing more. She was in truth a very different maid from any he thought fair — thought even a little fair, because there was no maid to whom he gave a real thought yet in his life, and to himself if he meditated on any maid at all it was to see some pretty flowery maid like Ai-lan, with little pretty hands and lovely looks and dainty ways, and all these qualities he saw in Ai-lan’s friends. Yet he had not loved one of them — he had only said in his heart that did he ever love, the maid must be pretty as a rose is pretty, or a budded plum flower or some such delicate useless thing. So had he written secret verses sometimes to such maids, a line or two and always unfinished, because the feeling was so slight and vague and there was no one single maid who stood enough to him as the one to write to above all others. It was rather that his love was diffused like a dim coming light before the sunrise.