"My father would drop over dead if I did. It is not the custom in Korea for the women of the family to dine with the men on an occasion like this. We eat alone in the kitchen."
"Have you a mother?"
"Yes, but she is in the kitchen."
"Will I not get to meet her before I go?"
"Perhaps? Perhaps not. If you meet her at all it will be just at the close, of the evening, providing my father thinks to call her. It is not important; so our Korean men think."
"But you; you know better? You have been in an American School?" I said, as she came in for the fifteenth course and paused a moment to talk with me.
"Yes, I know better! I know the American way of treating women is the Christian way," she said sadly.
"And what do you think of that way? Do you not like that way better than the Korean way?" I asked.
"The American way is much better." Then she paused and much to my delight used a typical American girl's phrase, with an appealing touch of pathos in her voice and a blush of crimson in her brown cheeks, "Why, I just love the American way!" she said and then fled, blushing with shame, as if she had said something immodest.
I did not see her again that evening. Nor did I see any of the other women of that household. Nor did I see the mother of the home at all.