«The Feast of Lanterns» by Louise Jordan Miln (1921)
CHAPTER I
ALL Chinese home-life starts with one great underlying advantage-physical beauty.
And it has many others.
Every Chinese is born into surroundings of preeminent beauty—beauty of form, beauty of color, beauty of exquisite juxtapositions—natural beauty and beauty of all things that are made; into beauty, and into an almost untainted atmosphere of good-taste and intrinsic kindliness.
Consciously or unconsciously every Chinese is a sincere lover of nature and of everything lovely. No other people has so stern and uncompromising a sense of justice, so ready a sense of humor, more balance, more unflinching loyalty, or less exaggerated estimate of the importance of self. It is a proud people without vanity—a self-reliant, strong people, lacking brutality; suave without affectation, dignified without self-assertion—free from ridiculousness, industrious, contented; hard-working dreamers who, too, are shrewdly practical, honest above all other races, home-keeping, home-loving; first of all peoples in its love of children, and in its chivalrous treatment and just estimate of womanhood.
