"How innocent you are," said Kuei-lien, still unabashed. "Shameful! It was disappointing, I admit, but not shameful. And such words from you, who have been so curious about marriage. How do you think husbands and wives spend their time? Writing scrolls, like you and Edward? You can be as fine a poet as you please, my dear, and paint charming pictures, and sit in a bamboo shelter with your teacup and your flute and your ink-stone like the heroines you read about, but your husband won't marry you for those things. He'll marry you for your face and your body, for this—and this—and this—" She touched the girl playfully on her cheeks and shoulders and thighs.
"That may be the way barbarians marry," objected Nancy; "that isn't our Chinese way."
"Our Chinese way!" Kuei-lien laughed. "Our Chinese way! What are you? You are not Chinese. Aren't you a barbarian yourself? You are English, and that is the English way."
"How do you know? You are not a wife. You are only my father's mistress. Your experience doesn't prove how a husband treats his wife. You have to do these things; that's what he bought you for."
Nancy's temper had got the better of her tact. Yet Kuei-lien controlled herself to a degree truly extraordinary for a Chinese woman. There was a dangerous flash in her eyes, but the concubine was content to treat the remarks as the petulant outburst of a child.
"Pooh! you are younger than I thought. You don't understand. Some day you will kneel to me for these words."
There was a gravity in this last comment so unlike the usual birdlike frivolity of Kuei-lien's that it left Nancy very much shaken. In her heart she recognized tacitly that the other girl was right. The episode of the night had shown the great gulf interposed between Kuei-lien's experience and her own. It was true: she did not understand. Nancy began to distrust her own defiant protests, the distinctions she had drawn between marriage and the harlotry of concubines, and remembered a hundred hints from the free-speaking women of the Herrick family, things which she had apprehended in the figurative way of a child. She did not have the optimism of Western maidens to help her. Love was not bound up with the myth of the "right man," so that Nancy, although in the first ardent flush of youth, picturing imaginative romance with some chosen stranger from that male world of which her father and her brother were the only representatives she had seen, had no real support against what seemed suddenly revealed as life hopelessly ugly.
In a night Nancy had become a rebel. But rebellion gave her no relief because it offered no hope. There was no bold plan to perform. Nancy never thought of escape to the West because the West meant nothing to her but a strange barbarous country with which she always was angry to hear herself connected. No taunt so roused her as the name of Englishman. The only fallacy she still retained was her trust in the superior refinement of Chinese ways. She saw nothing absurd in saying, "our Chinese ways," yet she and Edward were a race of their own, a race quite unique, who were entitled, not like Eurasians to the defects of two bloods, but to any advantage that might be gained from being Western-born and Chinese-trained.
Even their father was excluded from these privileges. He was an Englishman attempting imperfectly to assimilate the East. Nancy and Edward, without knowing it, made allowances for his case, and, in the midst of being fond of him, were subtly condescending over the little ways in which he failed to adapt his mind and his body, just as they remarked instantly the slight flaws, the little mistakes of accent and grammar, in his remarkable use of Chinese.
When the girl heard the next day that she with her brother had been summoned to an English class, she began to bristle. She went, of course, because she could not throw off in a moment the thought that the will of her father was law; nor could she alienate Edward's sympathy by an attitude she was too embarrassed to explain. But she went, inwardly protesting. Timothy Herrick was not noticeably different in his manner. He did not show, perhaps, quite so much of the whimsical amusement he usually evinced when glancing at his two sober little pupils. Nevertheless he sat unperturbed and Nancy, while envying his calmness, hated it.