"Can happen!" affirmed Lew Wee.
It was colourless. He was not treating his loss lightly nor yet was he bewailing it.
"You put your money in the bank next time," warned his employer sharply, "instead of letting it lie round in some flimsy Chinee junk shop. They're always burning."
Lew Wee regarded her with a stilled face.
"Can happen!" he again murmured.
He was the least bit insistent, as if she could not yet have heard this utterly sufficing truth. Then he was out; and a moment later the two-stringed fiddle whined a little song through two closed doors.
I said something acute and original about the ingrained fatalism of the
Oriental races.
Ma Pettengill laid down her paper, put aside her glasses, and said, yes, Chinee one fatal race; feeling fatal thataway was what made 'em such good help. Because why? Because, going to work at such-and-such a place, this here fatal feeling made 'em think one place was no worse than another; so why not stick here? If other races felt as fatal as the Chinee race it would make a grand difference in the help problem. She'd bet a million dollars right now that a lot of people wished the Swedes and Irish had fatal feelings like that.
I said Lew Wee had the look of one ever expecting the worst; even more than the average of his race.
"It ain't that," said my hostess. "He don't expect anything at all; or mebbe everything. He takes what comes. If it's good or bad, he says, 'Can happen!' in the same tone of voice; and that ends it. There he is now, knowing that all this good money he saved by hard labour has gone up in smoke, and paying the loss no more attention that if he'd merely broke a string on that squeaky long-necked contraption he saws."