In China there is no respectable word, so I am told, to denote a bachelor, and there was almost never, at least under the old regime, such a thing as an old maid. Every woman must belong to someone, and few and far between are the families that can afford to keep unmarried daughters, so the women regard as eminently fortunate those foreign women they come across, missionary or otherwise, who are apparently free to guide their own lives.
Of course the average husband would no more think of selling his wife than would an Englishman, but, unlike the Englishman, he knows that he has the right to do so should he so please, even as he has the right of life and death over her and his children. She is his chattel, to be faithful to her would simply be foolishness.
They tell a story of an angry father found digging a hole in which he proposed to bury his son alive. That son had been insolent, and it was a terrible thing to have an insolent son. His mother wept, but to her tears the father paid no heed. A stranger passed along and questioned the little company, and finding in his heart pity for the woman and the lad, cast about how he might help them. He did not set about it as we of the West would have done.
He commiserated with the father. It was a terrible thing to have an insolent son. Undoubtedly he deserved death. But it would be a bad thing to have no son to worship at the ancestral tablet.
That was provided for, said the irate parent. He had two other sons.
That was well! That was well! And of course they had sons?
No, they were young. They had no sons yet.
A-a-ah! And suppose anything happened by which they both should die?
The stranger let that sink in. He had struck the right chord. It would be a terrible thing to have no son to worship at the ancestral tablet—to think that he by his own act——
Chinese reasoning prevailed, and the son's life was spared.