“Ah, they like them well enough,” Mamma Chun answered; “but you see, they cannot forget that you are your daughters’ father.”
“Yet you forgot who my father was,” Ah Chun said gravely. “All you asked was for me to cut off my queue.”
“The young men are more particular than I was, I fancy.”
“What is the greatest thing in the world?” Ah Chun demanded with abrupt irrelevance.
Mamma Achun pondered for a moment, then replied: “God.”
He nodded. “There are gods and gods. Some are paper, some are wood, some are bronze. I use a small one in the office for a paper-weight. In the Bishop Museum are many gods of coral rock and lava stone.”
“But there is only one God,” she announced decisively, stiffening her ample frame argumentatively.
Ah Chun noted the danger signal and sheered off.
“What is greater than God, then?” he asked. “I will tell you. It is money. In my time I have had dealings with Jews and Christians, Mohammedans and Buddhists, and with little black men from the Solomons and New Guinea who carried their god about them, wrapped in oiled paper. They possessed various gods, these men, but they all worshipped money. There is that Captain Higginson. He seems to like Henrietta.”
“He will never marry her,” retorted Mamma Achun. “He will be an admiral before he dies—”