And, “Don’t you tell,” said Aron.

“I won’t,” Samuel assured him. “Don’t tell what?” Adam asked. Samuel said, “Can’t there be a privacy? I have a secret with your son.”

Cal broke in, “I’ll tell you a secret too, right after dinner.”

“I’ll like to hear it,” said Samuel. “And I do hope I don’t know already what it is.”

Lee looked up from his carving and glared at Samuel. He began piling meat on the plates.

The boys ate quickly and quietly, wolfed their food. Aron said, “Will you excuse us, Father?”

Adam nodded, and the two boys went quickly out. Samuel looked after them. “They seem older than eleven,” he said. “I seem to remember that at eleven my brood were howlers and screamers and runners in circles. These seem like grown men.”

“Do they?” Adam asked.

Lee said, “I think I see why that is. There is no woman in the house to put a value on babies. I don’t think men care much for babies, and so it was never an advantage to these boys to be babies. There was nothing to gain by it. I don’t know whether that is good or bad.”

Samuel wiped up the remains of gravy in his plate with a slice of bread. “Adam, I wonder whether you know what you have in Lee. A philosopher who can cook, or a cook who can think? He has taught me a great deal. You must have learned from him, Adam.”

Adam said, “I’m afraid I didn’t listen enough—or maybe he didn’t talk.”

“Why didn’t you want the boys to learn Chinese, Adam?”

Adam thought for a moment. “It seems a time for honesty,” he said at last. “I guess it was plain jealousy. I gave it another name, but maybe I didn’t want them to be able so easily to go away from me in a direction I couldn’t follow.”

“That’s reasonable, enough and almost too human,” said Samuel. “But knowing it—that’s a great jump. I wonder whether I have ever gone so far.”

Lee brought the gray enameled coffeepot to the table and filled the cups and sat down. He warmed the palm of his hand against the rounded side of his cup. And then Lee laughed. “You’ve given me great trouble, Mr. Hamilton, and you’ve disturbed the tranquillity of China.”

“How do you mean, Lee?”

“It almost seems that I have told you this,” said Lee. “Maybe I only composed it in my mind, meaning to tell you. It’s an amusing story anyway.”

“I want to hear,” said Samuel, and he looked at Adam. “Don’t you want to hear, Adam? Or are you slipping into your cloud bath?”

“I was thinking of that,” said Adam. “It’s funny—a kind of excitement is coming over me.”

“That’s good,” said Samuel. “Maybe that’s the best of all good things that can happen to a human. Let’s hear your story, Lee.”

The Chinese reached to the side of his neck and he smiled. “I wonder whether I’ll ever get used to the lack of a queue,” he said. “I guess I used it more than I knew. Yes, the story. I told you, Mr. Hamilton, that I was growing more Chinese. Do you ever grow more Irish?”