"Good lord!" murmured the person opposite, beginning to manifest an
excess of emotion for which I was quite unable to account. "Then you
have been in this train--your actual footsteps I mean, Mr. Kong; not
your ceremonial abstract subliminal ego--ever since?"

To this I replied that his words shone like the moon at midnight with
scintillating points of truth; adding, however, as the courtesies of
the occasion required, that I had been so impressed with the
many-sided brilliance of his conversation earlier in the day as to
render the flight of time practically unnoticed by me.

"But did it never occur to you to ask at one of the stations?" he
demanded, still continuing to wave his hands incapably from side to
side. "Any of the porters would have told you."

"Kong Li Heng, the founder of our line, who was really great, has been
dead eleven centuries, and no single fact or incident connected with
his life has been preserved to influence mankind," I replied. "How
much less will it matter, then, even in so limited a space of time as
a hundred years, in what fashion so insignificant a person as the one
before you acted on any occasion, and why, therefore, should he
distress himself unnecessarily to any precise end?" In this manner I
sought to place before him the dignified example of an
imperturbability which can be maintained in every emergency, and at
the same time to administer a plain yet scrupulously-sheathed rebuke;
for the inauspicious manner in which he had first drawn me on to speak
confidently of the ceremonies of the Royal Palace and then held up my
inadequacy to undeserved contempt had not rejoiced my imagination, and
I was still uncertain how much to claim, and whether, perchance, even