"Why marry her to a Chinese? Haven't you men in the West?"
This was the obviously pertinent question Herrick himself had been facing. He made up for argument by an outburst of temper.
"Why do you think I have gone to all this trouble these many years to have my children reared as Chinese?"
"I don't know," confessed Kuei-lien.
"Because the West has nothing but a beastly machine-ridden civilization, nothing but thoughts of merchandise and profit, fattening the bodies and thinning the souls of its people. A Westerner couldn't live in these mountains, for example, without wanting to dam the stream and make an electric plant. He wouldn't see the color of the hills, the light of the dawning sun shining on stones and trees; he would suffer an unbearable itch to change them, to make them useful. Bah! Every one of them is a materialist; none of them know the finer relationships of life. I haven't brought up my daughter to be the wife of a bank clerk."
"Oh," said Kuei-lien blankly, implying by her colorless response to Herrick's enthusiasm that she considered him a palpable fool.
"No, I won't destroy all she has learned," the man went on, "I won't make her a Western barbarian by marrying the girl to a man who can talk of nothing but golf and horses and the fluctuations of rubber shares. She would much better be a nun. Some day I think I shall divide everything I own between you—that would be more seemly than having the five of you fight for it after I die—then I'll go into the mountains with Nancy and Edward and enjoy a hermitage of my own."
"I'll go with you," mocked Kuei-lien. "You won't be happy without women in your hermitage."
"You'll go where the money goes. I am too old to be deceived by sweet phrases. Any man can be let alone if he is poor enough. It is only the rich who are burdened with women."
Kuei-lien was intensely amused by this expression of contempt.