"Who taught you to lie?" he sneered. "I have no patience with such nonsense. Your business is to answer me, not to argue with me."
Greatly restraining herself, Nancy said nothing.
"Of course you were spying," Herrick continued, "and you haven't had the grace to be sorry. Now, by way of making amends, I want you to kowtow three times to me."
"It is right that a daughter should kowtow to her father," said Nancy simply, "but I am not sorry."
"Then you may stand here till you are sorry."
He had asked the impossible. After two hours of silence, during which the girl stood like a rigid statue, Herrick realized that there was a sturdiness in his daughter's nature which he might break but assuredly could not bend. He began to admire the endurance of the child while he grew more and more oppressed by the discomfort of his own position.
"Well, that will be enough," he said, trying to gloss the fact of his defeat, "I think you have learned your lesson and have been punished sufficiently. You needn't stay any longer: you may go."
To his amazement, Nancy knelt down and bowed her head to the ground three times.
"I am sorry I could not obey my father," she said.
"What is the child!" wondered Herrick, when she had gone. "Just when I think she is hopelessly English, she outvies the spirit of the Analects themselves. Is she English or is she Chinese?"