keener to see the garden, and, if possible, the house—it was said to be very wonderful—than to exploit little Miss Wu. But she thought the girl pretty after a grotesque Chinese fashion, "cute" and not unattractive, and she looked at her with sincerely friendly eyes.
The young eyes that looked back at her were mingled adoration and resentment. This was Basil's mother, and she was like him. This was the honorable mother who had given him life and nursed him at her breast. And this was the woman because of whom he was going to forsake her, and shut her out forever from peace, honor and paradise. Because of this woman standing smiling at her here he forbade her Europe and joyful motherhood. And he had shut her forever out of China! Why? Oh! why?
There are three supreme moments in the life of every Chinese girl to whom the gods are not hideously unkind: the moment when her unknown bridegroom lifts up her red veil and looks upon her face—perhaps to love and cherish, perhaps to loathe and punish; the moment when the midwife says, "Hail, Lady, it is an honorable son," and lays the funny little red, squirming firstborn on her breast to be adored, and always to adore her; and the moment when she meets eyes with her husband's mother, and they look a little into each other's souls. And this last is the supreme moment of her fate. In all the small ways that make up the most of every woman's life, her comfort and happiness will depend upon this mother-in-law even more than upon her husband—and mothers-in-law live long in China. Women are the pampered class in China, as they are almost everywhere, and will be until "new" hermaphrodite "movements" have pulled nature from her throne. And in the quiet ways, the ways that count, the supremacy of the Chinese
