Peking picnic [antikvár]

VCHAPTER ITo live in two different worlds at the same time is both difficult and disconcerting. Actually, of course, the bodypcannot be in China and in Oxfordshire simultaneously.f.But it can, and does, travel rapidly between the one place and the other, while the mind or the heart persists obstinately in lingering where the body is not, or in leaping ahead to the place whither the body is bound. The whole man or perhaps chiefly the whole womanis in such circumstances never completely anywhere." La nef qui disjoint nos amours," cried Mary Stuart to France from the deck of the ship in which she sailed to Scotland :" N''a ""cy de may que la moictie. line part te resteelle est tienne . .And the lingering spirit, summoned back by some importunate demand on the attention, brings with ita host of pictures, of scenes complete with scents and sounds, which it intrudes at the most unsought moments, so that the images of both worlds shift and change before one hke drop-scenes in a theatre. It is all most confusing and disabling, and so Mrs. Leroy found it.She was sitting in the garden of a large house in the Tartar City. What she saw with her bodily eyes was a small goldfish-pond set in a miniature landscape of rocks and grottoes, against a background of pavilions with red pillars, painted eaves, and tent-hke roofs of green tiles, over which the formal plumed tops of two immense pines in the next courtyard showed black against the hght glittering sky. A band was playing in one of the pavilions, a buffet was being served from behind and depleted from in front in another; a short stout lady and a tall thin man9