Excerpt

"I couldn't understand it," he said earnestly. His blue eyes were full of pain and clear wonder. "They never asked me anything about China." It was an old hurt, carried in his heart over all the years. For he had come home a man, full in stature and wisdom, ripe with experience beyond any of theirs. He had been beyond the horizon of hills and fields, beyond even the West that seemed so far, beyond the seas. He had eaten strange foods, had walked the streets of other countries and had learned to speak a foreign tongue. But here, he was only Andrew come home again. No one cared that he spoke, read and wrote Chinese excellently; no one asked him, "What do they eat over there and what do they wear?" They examined briefly a few gifts Carie brought. The old man was far more pleased when she took his old coat and ripped it apart and turned it and made it look new again.

Andrew, dwelling upon it when he was an old man, said, the painful dry red creeping into his cheeks, "They said I was very quiet and that I didn't talk. But they didn't ask me anything. Why should I tell them what they did not care to know?"