"She is an educated woman," he told me when he had engaged her, "and I want her to teach you all you could learn in a first-class girls' school in Europe or America."
After that the French governess spent hours with me every day, and I saw my father only at intervals. How much we talked about, that French lady and I! Everything, almost, except religion; that my father vetoed, as her faith was not the one he wished me to embrace. "I'll take you over to your grandmother by and by," he used to say, "to get the proper religious instruction."
The governess said that I inherited more from my father's side of the house than my mother's; that although I was born in China, I was more of an Occidental than an Oriental; more than once she said that my American mannerisms and tricks of speech were really remarkable, and that I was a living example of the power of heredity. But I am never going back on my mother's people, never, my dear little oval-faced mother whose grave is under a spreading camphor tree at the heart of the world.
Does it not mean something that China is at the centre of the world—the kernel?
"The girl is not bad to look at, in fact I think she is a beauty—a face filled with the indescribable dash of the Orient," said my Uncle Theodore, when they were talking me over in the sitting-room after I had retired to my chamber upstairs. Evidently they had forgotten the opening in the floor which had been left by the workmen while making some changes in the plumbing. And they did not know my extraordinary keenness of hearing, which my governess said was an Oriental trait.
It seemed to give my governess some pleasure to talk about that keen sense of the Orientals, and to speculate as to how they had acquired it. "They have lived in a country where it is necessary, for self-protection, to hear all that is being plotted and planned," she said, "a country of conspiracies and intrigues, of plots and counterplots. Centuries of this have developed abnormal hearing."
"She has a superb figure," said my uncle, continuing to talk about me, "and that oval face of hers, with her creamy complexion, is really bewitching."
"Yellow! you mean, yellow!" interrupted my Aunt Gwendolin; "she's entirely too yellow for beauty. I'm terribly afraid that some of our set will discover her nationality. That's one thing you must remember, Theodore, nobody on this continent is ever to learn anything about her Chinese blood. They are so despised here as a race. She is our brother's daughter, with some foreign strain inherited from her mother; that is enough; never, never, let us acknowledge the Chinese. The Italians and Spanish are yellowish too,—I have it!" she exclaimed, "Spanish!—Spanish will do!—Some of those are our people now, you know! It will be quite interesting to have her a native of one of our Dependencies—a descendant of some old Spanish family!"
"Do not be foolish, Gwendolin," said my grandmother.
"I could not endure the thought of introducing a Celestial," continued my aunt. "None must know that we have introduced the Yellow Peril into the country!"