An amah called, “The morning rice is ready.”

Dong-Yung hurried into the open room, where the light was still faint, filtering in through a high-silled window and the door.  A round, brown table stood in the center of the room.  In the corner of the room behind stood the crescentic, white plaster stove, with its dull wooden kettle-lids and its crackling straw.  Two cooks, country women, sat in the hidden corner behind the stove, and poked in the great bales of straw and gossiped.  Their voices and the answers of the serving amah filled the kitchen with noise.  In their decorous niche at the upper right hand of the stove sat the two kitchen gods, small ancient idols, with hidden hands and crossed feet, gazing out upon a continually hungry world.  Since time was they had sat there, ensconced at the very root of life, seemingly placid and unseeing and unhearing, yet venomously watching to be placated with food.  Opposite the stove, on the white wall, hung a row of brass hooks, from which dangled porcelain spoons with pierced handles.  On a serving-table stood the piled bowls for the day, blue-and-white rice patterns, of a thin, translucent ware, showing the delicate light through the rice seeds; red-and-green dragoned bowls for the puddings; and tiny saucer-like platters for the vegetables.  The tea-cups, saucered and lidded, but unhandled, stood in a row before the polished brass hot-water kettle.

The whole room was full of a stirring, wakening life, of the crackling straw fire, of the steaming rice, all white and separate-kerneled in its great, shallow, black iron kettles lidded with those heavy hand-made wooden lids while the boiling tea water hissed, and spat out a snake of white steam.

With that curious democracy of China, where high and low alike are friendly, Dong-Yung hurried into her beloved kitchen.

“Has the master come?” asked the serving maid.

“Coming, coming,” Dong-Yung answered, “I myself will take in his morning rice, after I have offered the morning oblations to the gods.”

Dong-Yung selected two of the daintiest blue-and-white rice-pattern bowls.  The cook lifted off the wooden lid of the rice-kettle, and Dong-Yung scooped up a dipperful of the snow-white kernels.  On the tiny shelf before each god, the father and mother god of the household, Dong-Yung placed her offering.  She stood off a moment, surveying them in pleased satisfaction—­the round, blue bowls, with the faint tracery of light; the complacent gods above, red and green and crimson, so age-long, comfortably ensconced in their warm stove corner.  She made swift obeisance with her hands and body before those ancient idols.  A slant of sunshine swept in from the high windows and fell over her in a shaft of light.  The thoughts of her heart were all warm and mixed and confused.  She was happy.  She loved her kitchen, her gods, all the familiar ways of Chinese life.  She loved her silken, satin clothes, perfumed and embroidered and orchid-crowned, yet most of all she loved her lord and master.  Perhaps it was this love for him that made all the rest of life so precious, that made each bowl of white rice an oblation, each daily act a glorification.  So she flung out her arms and bent her head before the kitchen gods, the symbol of her ancient happiness.