October 1931
B u s i n e s S
454
T h e K i n g ’ s
mil C^iirYOUNG R . . . By FLORENCE NYE WHITWELL
0 {e a A ioO fe a A
Pansy ,gazed at him. “Wu, you’re way up above us, I guess.”
T H E S T IN G “The sting Of death is sin; and the strength of sin is the law. But thanks be to God, which giveth us the vic tory through our Lord Jesus Christ” (1 Cor. 15 :56, 57). marked Pansy, with a toss of her bobbed head. “Well, I ’m not going to get hot ’n’ bothered over it,” replied Marguerite dryly. “No-o-o,” said Pansy thoughtfully, “but I just won der what it is that makes those boy and girl friends of Aunt Mary’s enjoy life so! They’re different from all the kids I ’ve ever known. And they’re always having a better time than anybody else.” “They have me puzzled,” admitted Hollywood’s ris ing star-director, with as much of a frown as her beauti cian allowed her. Mr. Wu never stood on ceremony with his young employers. Indeed, they would not have known how to take it if he had. He looked up as he placed a dish of toast upon the breakfast table and said quickly, “We are a peculiar people.” “Who are ‘we’?” asked Marguerite coolly. “Christ’s strangers,” replied Mr. Wu calmly as he vanished into the kitchen. Pansy and Marguerite gazed at each other with the expression of those who are adrift in a fog. “What did you say, Wu ?” Pansy asked as the young Chinese boy, in his crisp white suit, returned and set down a dish containing a golden brown omelet, surrounded by a frill of bacon curls. “Did you never hear, ‘The world barketh at Christ’s strangers’?” he inquired. “No," said Marguerite abruptly. “Now just what does that mean?” asked Pansy, un aware that she was questioning an utterance of the great Rutherford. Mr. Wu leaned his hands upon the breakfast table before him and reflected that he would rather miss his eight-thirty class at the university than lose this oppor tunity. “It means,” slowly began the Chinese Christian who considered himself a foreign missionary to these white heathen, “it means that when a lost one finds the Saviour and becomes His, he is no longer part of the world, though he is still in it. The world does not like it—” “Why not?” asked Pansy. “The world loves itself, and it does not enjoy having any one turn his back on all its allurements.” Pansy turned uneasily in her chair and sought to change the subject. “Land, W u ! You speak better English than I do!” “My teacher was an Oxford man—his father founded the mission where'I was born. But he used to say to me, ‘O little Wu, learn to speak with “the foreign accent of the glory world!” ’ ” 3C can ’ t make it out ,” re
“It’s not I ! I should be just a yellow pagan but for Him. ‘The life which I now live . . . I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me.’ ” It was evident that this was so. It was no empty pro fession, no rattling of words like sounding brass or tink ling cymbal! The speaker was evidently full of that spir itual fullness which endues poor humanity with a power even greater than tongues of men or of angels. Why is it not more often so? Why do hungry hearts so often have to listen to testimonies or teachings that are letter-perfect as to soundness, but empty of all those sweet and heav enly echoes that make musical the soul that has been trans formed by Christ? “Spring Thou up within my heart. Rise to all eternity.” Pansy and Marguerite realized nothing of all this. They merely said to each other that they liked to hear the young Chinaman talk; they never knew what he was go ing to say next. This was indeed true. It is true, too, that people sometimes entertain angels unaware. But that also was beyond and above these girls, as yet. They were especially amazed at the Thin Red Line young people, because they seemed to have no thought of pairing off. Or as Pansy put it, “There’s no necking in that crowd, as far as I can see.” Why that should be, puzzled her. Another problem was the indefinable reserve that seemed to surround the cousins, Althea and Constance. “You get just so near to them and no nearer,” she re marked. “They have friends enough already,” Marguerite haz- zared. Now Pansy and Marguerite had had the feeling for some time that the world was their oyster—an oyster which they had very deftly and adroitly opened all by themselves. Of course they had had golden aid. One of the best chain groceries in the United States had. been back of them. And the shrewd business sense which both of them had inherited, and which they had acquired in those early years when they gravitated daily to “Poppa’s store,” had helped, too. But now that they had succeeded, they were beginning to look wistfully around them. Where was the gay life they had thought would so won- drously begin for them when they had reached their goal ? Somehow, it “just wasn’t” ! • “What we want is some swell friends,” Pansy an nounced firmly. And so the modern bungalow had had some very striking additions in the rectangular, triangular, cubical, and zig-zag art of the age. But a coy public refused to be allured by silent art. “We must stage something,” said Pansy. They did. It was, as they themselves said, “some affair.” But no body came—at least nobody who was anybody. ■ “Just a lot of people who want to get into Lifelike Pictures,” sighed Marguerite.
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