Their talk was sophisticated. Nancy was curious about the forbidden topic of marriage, eager to gain all the knowledge she could from the experience of her father's mistress. To Chinese girls of her age marriage loomed on the horizon, so that it was little wonder she exercised much ingenious fancy in pondering who her husband was to be.
"Oh, you will marry an Englishman," said Kuei-lien.
"But I have never seen an Englishman."
"Your father is an Englishman."
"Pooh, my father is too old!" Such was Nancy's respect for Kuei-lien's superior acquaintance with life that she never thought of the concubine as only two years older than herself, nor that what her words suggested in her own case must also be true in Kuei-lien's. And there was the further difference that a concubine is not a wife; for a man of fifty to take a concubine of seventeen was only reasonable; to take a wife of seventeen would have been extraordinary. Nancy could not have imagined a man living unmarried to the ripe age of fifty.
"My father is too old. What does a young Englishman look like? Have you ever seen one?"
"Of course, I've seen many," replied Kuei-lien, ignoring, if she was aware of it, Nancy's defect of tact. "There are many young Englishmen in Peking. They have yellow hair and red faces and big teeth and big moustaches like your father's—"
"The young ones?"
"Yes, the young ones. I think they are born with moustaches. They wear short coats, and look very hot, and always say 'goddam' to their friends."
The picture was too repulsive.