He said it without any brutality, without any conscious male superiority; simply as a statement of fact. A melancholy fact, doubtless. But a fact, unchangeable, stony.
“But—but—” Fanny’s gutter flow of words floundered in the eddy of her amazement, her hurt pride and vanity. “I’m a woman myself—an’ I—”
“Assuredly you are a woman and you have done your duty. You have borne me a son. Perhaps, if the omens be favorable you will bear me yet another. But this—this girl—” He dismissed little Fanny with a wave of his pudgy, dimpled hand as a regrettable accident, and continued, soothingly: “She will be taken care of. Already I have written to friends of our clan in San Francisco to arrange for a suitable disposal when the baby has reached the right age.” He said it in his mellow, precise English. He had learned it at a night-school, where he had been the pride and honor of his class.
Fanny had risen. She left her couch. With a swish-swish of knitted bed-slippers she loomed up on the ring of faint light shed by the swinging petroleum lamp in the center of the room. She approached her husband, the baby held close to her heart with her left hand, her right hand aimed at Nag Hong Fah’s solid chest like a pistol. Her deep-set, violet-blue eyes seemed to pierce through him.
But the Chinese blood in her veins—shrewd, patient—scotched the violence of her American passion, her American sense of loudly clamoring for right and justice and fairness. She controlled herself. The accusing hand relaxed and fell gently on the man’s shoulder. She was fighting for her daughter, fighting for the drop of white blood in her veins, and it would not do to lose her temper.
“Looka here, Chinkie-Toodles,” she said. “You call yerself a Christian, don’t yer? A Christian an’ an American. Well, have a heart. An’ some sense! This ain’t China, Toodles. Lil Fanny ain’t goin’ to be weighed an’ sold to some rich brother Chink at so many seeds per pound. Not much! She’s gonna be eddycated. She’s gonna have her chance, see? She’s gonna be independent of the male beast an’ the sorta life wot the male beast likes to hand to a skoit. Believe me, Toodles, I know what I’m talkin’ about!”
But he shook his stubborn head. “All has been settled,” he replied. “Most satisfactorily settled!”
He turned to go. But she rushed up to him. She clutched his sleeve.
“Yer—yer don’t mean it? Yer can’t mean it!” she stammered.
“I do, fool!” He made a slight, weary gesture as if brushing away the incomprehensible. “You are a woman—you do not understand—”