But Mulan was a child of Peking. She had grown up there and had drunk in all the richness of life of the city which enveloped its inhabitants like a great mother soft toward all her childrens requests, fulfilling all their whims and desires, or like a huge thousand-year-old tree in which the insects making their home in one branch did not know what the insects in the other branch were doing. She had learned from Peking its tolerance, geniality, and urbanity, as we all in our formative years catch something of the city and country we live in. She had grown up with the yellow-roofed palaces and the purple and greenroofed temples, the broad boulevards and the long, crooked alleys, the busy thoroughfares and the quiet districts that were almost rural in their effect; the common mans homes with their inevitable pomegranate trees and jars of goldfish, no less than the rich mans mansions and gardens; the open-air tea houses where men loll on rattan armchairs under cypress tress, spending twenty cents for a whole afternoon in summer; the enclosed teashops where in winter men eat steaming-hot mutton fried with onion and drink pehkan and where the great rub shoulders with the humble; the wonderful theaters, the beautiful restaurants, the bazaars, the lantern streets and the curio streets; the temple fairs which register the days of the month.