Kuei-lien shrugged her shoulders over the bad taste of such frankness.
"You take her child's notions too seriously," she said.
"Yes, but what am I to do with her?" inquired Herrick, openly acknowledging his perplexity over the problem he would not admit had been vexing him.
"Do you ask advice from the lowest of your servants? Surely her poor wisdom cannot solve matters of such difficulty."
Herrick knew that Kuei-lien was jeering at him behind her studied modesty.
"Don't talk this farcical nonsense to me," he cried, brusquely impatient of the Eastern ways it had been his habit to extol. "If your poor wisdom is able to criticize the girl's own plan, it is able to suggest something better."
"Why shouldn't she marry? No father who loves his daughter neglects to have her married. She isn't sick; why should she be a nun?"
"Marrying is not easy and you know it. Suppose I call the matchmaker; what will she find for me? Can she find a son-in-law good enough for my daughter, a son-in-law with the same learning, the same training?"
"That was your fault in wasting money to have her taught."
"The money wasn't wasted. That's not my meaning at all. What I mean is that families of her rank and education will be afraid to betroth their sons to her because she isn't Chinese. Yet in speech and ways, even in the color of her hair, she is as thoroughly Chinese as any girl they could get. Healthier too and better looking. But the good families would be too conservative to consider the match and even a swaggering squint-eyed upstart of a returned student would think he was doing Nancy a favor to be her husband."