"I have picked too many," said Nancy; "one would have given me happiness. Oh, my flowers, my flowers," she cried, "I am sorry because I killed you! One would have given me happiness, yet I have taken so many."
Impulsively she turned to Kuei-lien with a serious look in her dark eyes.
"Is that all they live for, just to give us happiness?"
"Just to give us happiness," Kuei-lien echoed.
"Then to whom do we give happiness? What do we live for?"
"We are flowers, too," laughed the older girl, amused by the soberness of Nancy's question. "We give happiness to men."
Her reply was not meant to be flippant, but from Kuei-lien's lips it came too truthfully. It stirred in Nancy's newly informed, her bitterly informed, heart a distaste for her womanly fortune.
She looked down the rugged valley, saw the mellow colors of the hills, a distant gleam of the plain, all suffused through a patina of golden sunshine, and a shadow troubled her youthful face at the thought that she could not belong to these forever, that she could not be like the yellow butterfly hovering above the flowers or like the hawk Edward blithely was chasing, but must be cooped up amid the tattle of women's quarters to give—the picture stuck in her brain—to give happiness to men.
The unhurried tones of a bell sounded from some far recess of the mountains. Instinctively Nancy bent her head to the ground. Three times before her little heap of blossoms she touched her forehead to the grass.
"Why are you doing that?" asked Kuei-lien in surprise.