The t'ai-t'ai and her sister-in-law were more surprised than Nancy. They were dismayed. What the old t'ai-t'ai said, she meant; she had come to an age when she did not trouble to hide her thoughts of other people, but ruled her clan, as the last of the oldest generation, with an unsparing frankness such as made them quail. Hers was a witty, biting tongue which she found life too short to think of bridling; she did not like her daughter, still less her daughter-in-law, thought none too highly of her sons, and, as for her grandchildren, she called them a litter of gaping puppies. Her mind was a catalogue of their faults; she could make the best of them wince with a single sharply prodding phrase, for there was nothing ridiculous that any of them had done, and wished with all his heart to forget, that she could not recall when the occasion suited her. Grown men writhed for a pretext to get beyond earshot of her chuckle.
Yet she did not welcome Nancy kindly—as the t'ai-t'ai and her sister-in-law concluded—merely to annoy them. Her instinct, which always was extravagantly right, had told her that Nancy would be a friend. She did not care whether Ming-te had a wife or not, but she longed for someone young, someone talented and pretty, to whom she could talk and be kind. Her own family bored her. She yawned when she thought of them. They were a small, petty-minded generation, while her memory dwelt upon the large days of the past. Her loyalty was all to the past, to her husband and his father, to the family in its time of splendor, before its name had been dragged in the dust by a progeny that forsook their books and squabbled over cash like beggars fighting in the street. So she had ruled them with a testy loneliness, glad to be alive only because she knew they would be glad if she were dead.
Her first glimpse of Nancy satisfied the keen-sighted old tyrant. She drew the pale girl to her side like a child.
"It's a long time since I've seen anyone really young," she said, "young and wise together as they used to be. Now we have a republic; men don't trouble about wisdom and they think they can rule the eighteen provinces before they have left off their mother's milk. You have read books, I have heard, and can write poems. Your father would see to that. He knew our customs. He was one of us."
She could be tactful when she chose; in her questions about the death of Nancy's father she soothed rather than irritated the quick feelings of the daughter.
"To die on the day of your wedding, ai, that was a strange thing. I have lived many years, but I have never heard the like. That was a proof that he loved you, my child. You must remember such a father. And you have a brother, too; where is he?"
Nancy told the story of Edward's friends.
"So you have Western friends. How did you come to make them?"
Paragraph by paragraph she drew from Nancy's lips the tale of how they had met and visited the Ferrises. The old lady enjoyed the freshness of the girl's story. She wanted most exact details of how these foreigners lived.
"It must have surprised them to see one of their own blood living in the fashion of a Chinese. Did you like their ways?"