Here the little girl grew to womanhood, knowing no companionship except that of her mother and her teachers.  Her mother employed the best possible Chinese teachers for her, and she early learned to read the books of the three religions of China, that she might join her mother in her pursuit of truth.  She seldom left the house, and no one but her teachers ever entered it, but day after day she pored over the books on Taoism, Buddhism, and Confucianism until she had read them all.  She, too, became a Taoist nun, but continued in the worship and study of Buddhism and Confucianism also, determined to find the true religion.

She even surpassed her mother in the ardour of her search for truth, for she spent twelve entire years, in periods of three years each, in one room of the house, living in the most absolute seclusion, not seeing her mother, speaking to no one, and hearing no voice, for three years at a time.  After such a vigil she came out into the rest of the house for a year, then went back for another three years of solitude.  In one corner of this room were the shrine and the altar before which Yu Kuliang knelt hour after hour during the years of her long vigil, and the idols, large and small, of wood and stone, which were her only companions.  She always kept three sticks of incense burning before the shrine, one for each religion, that she might be sure not to make a mistake.  In the ardour of her devotion she even made offerings of pieces of her own flesh to the idols.  Her whole body, even her face, was covered with the ugly round scars caused by this self-mutilation.

When Yu Kuliang was a woman of thirty-two she learned that the Stones were her cousins, and of her own accord went to call on them.  Thereafter the doors of “Purity Hall,” so long fast closed to all, were thrown open to the Stone family.  Yu Kuliang and her cousin Dr. Mary Stone, born at almost the same time, living, and having always lived, lives as totally different as two lives could be, became fast friends.  To Dr. Stone, Yu Kuliang frankly confessed that an entire life spent in seeking truth had not brought her success.  She was very willing to listen to all that Dr. Stone had to tell her of the truth which she had found, and finally even succeeded in summoning up sufficient courage to attend the Sunday morning church service.  Her years of seclusion had made her so timid, and so afraid of mingling among people, however, that the first time she came to the church she disguised herself in the garb of a Chinese man.  Dr. Stone gave her a Bible and she began the study of it at once, with the same earnestness and determination to find truth that she had shown in her study of the books of the Chinese religion.

After she had once gained courage to attend the church service she came frequently, no longer in man’s clothes, nor in the coarse, grey cotton costume of the Taoist nun, which she discarded soon after knowing Dr. Stone, but in the ordinary dress of the Chinese woman.  She became a frequent visitor to the hospital, too, where she loved to follow Dr. Stone from ward to ward, or to sit beside her in the dispensary as she cared for the suffering women and children who flocked there daily.