My mother died while I was yet a child, and my father has died and left me alone in the world within the last year. Grandmother, my father's mother, when she learned about her son's death, sent at once for me.
"I cannot leave a granddaughter of mine in that country, and among that heathen, if not barbarous, people," she wrote to the American consul, "and I ask your services to assist her to come to my home in America."
The consul, absent-minded, gave me my grandmother's letter to read, and thus I learned her feeling about my mother's people and country. I never would have come to this horrible America if I could have helped myself; but I am scarcely of age, and by my father's will grandmother is appointed my guardian.
The result of it all is, that having crossed the intervening waters, I am here in the home of my grandmother, my Aunt Gwendolin and my Uncle Theodore Morgan.
When I arrived this morning I was ushered into the sitting-room by a maid, and the first one I beheld was my grandmother, sitting in a rocking-chair. She called me to her, and crossing the room, I kotowed to her, that is I went down on my hands and knees and touched my forehead to the floor, as my Chinese nurse had taught me when I was yet a baby that I should always do when I came into the presence of an elderly woman, a mother of children.
"My dear grandchild!" cried my grandmother, "do get up. All you should do is to kiss me—your grandmother!" And she put out her hand and assisted me from the floor.
Grandmother is the dearest, prettiest little woman I ever saw, with white hair and the brightest of eyes, and I have to love her, although I had made up my mind to hate everything in America. A moment after she had lifted me from the floor, my Aunt Gwendolin came in. She is tall and thin, not nearly so beautiful a woman as my Chinese mother. She wears skirts that drag on the floor, and her hair is built up into a sort of a mountain on top of her head. I am reminded every time I look at her of a certain peak in the Thian Shan mountains. I very much prefer little women, like my own dear mother, like the women of my own country.
My Uncle Theodore is long-armed, long-legged, long-bodied. He looks a little like my father, and for that reason I hate him a little less than my Aunt Gwendolin.
After my mother's death, my father brought into our home a French governess, daughter of a French consul, to teach me. Father seemed to be lost in his business, or his grief at the loss of my mother, and paid very little heed to me after the arrival of the governess.