"Oh, yes it is," declared the concubine, "I know. They are discussing your presents right now. What a way to do it, with no middleman! But that's your foreign custom. Soon you'll be squeezing your waist into corsets and hiding your face with a white veil like a mourner. Poor Nancy, you won't have a red chair; foreigners never use them. They'll put you into a motor car and send you to a foreign worship hall where you'll have to kiss your husband and take his hand, so"—Nancy jerked free from Kuei-lien's provoking fingers,—"and then you'll use a knife and a fork and eat goat's meat till you smell like a Mongolian shepherd."
"I won't, I won't, I won't!" vowed Nancy, stamping her foot.
"Don't tease her," begged the nurse, beaming with smiles at the happy news; "you know it is not seemly to talk to a maiden about her future husband."
"Oh, it's quite all right by foreign custom. Your fiancé will come every day to see you; we shall all hide behind the door while you sit and talk and make love together."
"Yes, that is the custom," the amah admitted. "She will grow used to it. She ought to follow the practice of her ancestors."
Nancy, however, had not stayed to listen. She had slammed the doors of her room in their faces and flung herself across the bed, where in the semi-darkness she meditated upon a change she never for a moment doubted had been agreed to. It was while the nurse still triumphantly declaimed the fitness of Nancy's marrying an Englishman that Herrick appeared in the courtyard to deliver his curt message that they were to return to Peking on the morrow. The exultant words were frozen on the tongue of the amah. She had seen in Herrick's eyes the defeat of all her hopes.
Nancy and Edward were miserable at coming back to Peking. It was utterly dispiriting to be fenced by high walls in a garden that had shrunk: no wide views, no sound of tumbling streams, no walks across hills teeming with wild flowers—just the beat of paddles as the clothes were rinsed at the pond and the tedious gossip of women whose minds were confined like their bodies. The boy and girl relapsed into their old routine, took up again studies with their teacher, intermittent lessons with their father, the usual round of writing and reading, yet all with lassitude of spirit, with hearts aching for the hills.
Not even the Mid-autumn Festival, which because of the fewness of the Chinese holidays always had made such a stir in their lives, could wake the children from this lethargy. Nancy passed idly by the flowering cassia, the pride of her courtyard, and wholly forgot to thrust a sprig of the fragrant white blossoms into her hair. More from habit than from relish she ate her round moon cakes and climbed into the pine to see the largest moon of the year rise slowly from the east. She was homesick for her brief hours with Helen and Elizabeth and wrote them letters in English, long, affectionate letters which she could not send because she had no knowledge of where to send them. The exercise did bring some comfort; it seemed to provide some intercourse with her friends, and would have entertained them greatly, could the naïve, oddly phrased missives have found their destination.
Kuei-lien did not visit Nancy as she used to do. The words the daughter had spoken about her father's enemy were hard to forgive. She never pressed Nancy for their meaning because she always avoided unprofitable quarrels, but it became her policy to be cool to the girl, to snub her as one might snub a pert child. Much of the time she spent with the t'ai-t'ai, to whom she had related the tale of the summer. The t'ai-t'ai agreed unreservedly that Nancy and Edward were a problem; they ought to be sent back to the West. She offered no proposal, however, as to how they should be sent. The fact was that she was nursing plans of her own, plans which might not jump with Kuei-lien's humor.
She had gone to her husband, shortly after his return, and taxed him on the subject of her own daughter, Li-an. The girl was twelve. Ought they not to be choosing her a husband?