Charles Snow looked at her with gloomy eyes.
“The ugliest baby I ever saw. It isn’t like a baby. It’s like a hideous little Chinese god, and it looks ten thousand years old.”
“Then it mustn’t,” Sir Charles remarked grimly; “only an emperor may look ten thousand years old.”
“Well, then,” his wife retorted, “it looks twenty thousand. It hasn’t any eyes—just up-and-down wrinkled slits. It’s all cheek-bones and yellow—cheek-bones right up to its awful little eyebrows. It hasn’t any nose, and what it has is wider than its mouth, and those horrid up-and-down slits that I suppose are its eyes, if it has any eyes, keep waggle-waggling all the time, blink, blink, blink.”
Snow sighed, a smothered, dreary sigh. Emma’s description sounded Chinese enough.
“Looks like Sên, then?” he said.
“It does nothing of the kind!” Lady Snow stormed. “I tell you it is the most hideous, living thing I ever saw—and more Chinese-looking than any Chinaman I ever saw. It looks like Low Tease, or whatever you call him, when he was nine hundred years old, in those awful illustrated Chinese books of yours, and it looks twice as Chinese as Low Tease does.”
“Lao Tze was a mere boy of two or three hundred when he died, dear,” Sir Charles murmured gently.
“I don’t care!” Lady Snow snapped through her angry weeping. “It looks a disgrace! So there!”
“Are you sure? Sure that Ivy’s baby looks so very Chinese?”