This latter statement had to be taken with a grain of salt. For Fanny Mei Hi was not Irish. Her hair was golden, her eyes blue. But otherwise she was Chinese. Easily nine-tenths of her. Of course she denied it. But that is neither here nor there.
She was not a lady. Couldn’t be—don’t you see—with that mixed blood in her veins, Mr. Brian Neill acting as her uncle, and the standing pools of East Side vice about her.
But Nag Hong Fah, who was a poet and a philosopher, besides being the proprietor of the Great Shanghai Chop Suey Palace, said that she looked like a golden-haired goddess of evil, familiar with all the seven sins. And he added—this to the soothsayer of his clan, Nag Hop Fat—that he did not mind her having seven, nor seventeen, nor seven times seventeen bundles of sin, as long as she kept them in the sacred bosom of the Nag family.
“Yes,” said the soothsayer, throwing up a handful of painted ivory sticks and watching how they fell to see if the omens were favorable. “Purity is a jewel to the silly young. And you are old, honorable cousin—”
“Indeed,” chimed in Nag Hong Fah, “I am old and fat and sluggish and extremely wise. What price is there in purity higher than there is contained in the happiness and contentment of a respectable citizen when he sees men-children playing gently about his knees?”
He smiled when his younger brother, Nag Sen Yat, the opium merchant, spoke to him of a certain Yung Quai.
“Yung Quai is beautiful,” said the opium merchant, “and young—and of an honorable clan—and—”
“And childless! And in San Francisco! And divorced from me!”
“But there is her older brother, Yung Long, the head of the Yung clan. He is powerful and rich—the richest man in Pell Street! He would consider this new marriage of yours a disgrace to his face. Chiefly since the woman is a foreigner!”
“She is not. Only her hair and her eyes are foreign.”