Lee Tai. One day, and I think that day is not very far distant, you will come to me. I was the first and I shall be the last. If you like I will marry you.
Daisy. [With a smile.] I thought you had two, if not three, wives already. I fancy that number four would have rather a thin time.
Lee Tai. My wife can be divorced. I am willing to marry you before the British Consul. We will go to Penang. I have a house there. You shall have motor cars.
Daisy. It's astonishing how easy it is to resist temptations that don't tempt you.
Lee Tai. Sneer. What do I care? I wait.... What have you to do with white men? You are not a white woman. What power has this blood of your father's when it is mingled with the tumultuous stream which you have inherited through your mother from innumerable generations? Our race is very pure and very strong. Strange nations have overrun us, but in a little while we have absorbed them so that no trace of a foreign people is left in us. China is like the Yangtze, which is fed by five hundred streams and yet remains unchanged, the river of golden sand, majestic, turbulent, indifferent, and everlasting. What power have you to swim against that mighty current? You can wear European clothes and eat European food, but in your heart you are a Chinawoman. Are your passions the weak and vacillating passions of the white man? There is in your heart a simplicity which the white man can never fathom and a deviousness which he can never understand. Your soul is like a rice patch cleared in the middle of the jungle. All around the jungle hovers, watchful and jealous, and it is only by ceaseless labour that you can prevent its inroads. One day your labour will be vain and the jungle will take back its own. China is closing in on you.
Daisy. My poor Lee Tai, you're talking perfect nonsense.
Lee Tai. You're restless and unhappy and dissatisfied because you're struggling against instincts which were implanted in your breast when the white man was a hungry, naked savage. One day you will surrender. You will cast off the white woman like an outworn garment. You will come back to China as a tired child comes back to his mother. And in the immemorial usages of our great race you will find peace.
[There is a moment's silence. Daisy passes her hand over her forehead. Against her will she is strangely impressed by what Lee Tai has said. She gives a little shudder and recovers herself.
Daisy. George Conway loves me, and I— Oh!
Lee Tai. The white man's love lasts no longer than a summer day. It is a red, red rose. Now it flaunts its scented beauty proudly in the sun and to-morrow its petals, wrinkled and stinking, lie scattered on the ground.