"He does. He went to America a week ago; and the last thing he said was, 'If you marry anything but a Chinese I will kill you!'"
"Did he really mean it?" I asked her, astonished.
"He meant it more than anything he ever meant in his life. It would be considered a disgrace to my entire family if I married anybody but a Chinese boy."
"Even though your father married a Scotch woman?" I said.
"For that very reason it is imperative that I marry my own blood," she said.
"That is terrible!" I replied catching my first glimpse of the strange and terrible social position in which a girl of mixed blood is placed in China.
"You see," she said in a quiet, refined voice, with a marked English accent, "I have an English education but I have Chinese blood. I can never be happy marrying a Chinese after I have been educated in England. I can never be happy with Chinese clothes, Chinese customs, and Chinese people. And yet if I marry the man I love, it will break my father's heart. He would kill me to be sure; for if he says he will, that means that he will keep his word. But that would not be the worst of it. To die would be easy."
"What would be the worst of it?" I asked, my heart stirred with a strangely deep sympathy at this beautiful Chinese girl's dilemma.
"The worst thing would be that it would break my father's heart!"
Then she wept.