of her perfect serenity. She never, it became apparent, descended from
the most inflexible self-control; small emotions--surface gayety of
mood, curiosity, the faintest possible indication of contempt, he had
learned to distinguish; the fact that she cared enough for him to desert
every familiar circumstance was evident; but beyond these he was
powerless to reach.

His own emotions were hardly less obscured: the dominating feeling was
his admiration for her exquisite worldly wisdom, the perfection of her
bodily beauty, and the philosophy which bore her above the countless
trivialities that destroyed the dignity of western minds. He realized
that her paint and embroidery covered a spirit as cold and tempered as
fine metal. She was totally without the social sentiment of his own
world; but she was equally innocent of its nauseous hypocrisy, the
pretensions of a piety covering commercial dishonesty, obscenity of
thought and spreading scandal. The injustice he saw practiced on shore
had always turned him with a sense of relief to the cleansing challenge
of the sea; always, brought in contact with cunning and self-seeking men
and heartless schemes, with women cheapened by a conviction of the
indecency of life, he was in a state of hot indignation. From all this
Taou Yuen offered a complete escape.

On the purely feminine side she was a constant delight, the last possible
refinement, he told himself, of instinct and effect. She was incapable of
the least vulgarity; never for an instant did she flag from the necessity
of beauty, never had he seen her too weary for an adornment laborious in
a hundred difficult conventions. She was, too, a continuous source of
entertainment, even as his wife she never ceased to be a spectacle; his
consciousness of her as a being outside himself persisted.