and little hope that he would not be tortured first. And the horrors of Chinese tortures lose little hideousness in the telling at English clubs in China. Basil was abjectly tormented.
The mandarin sat and studied his prisoner curiously. His lip curled, and his soul. What had his daughter, bred for centuries from China's best and finest, descended from Wu Sankwei and from the two supreme Sages, and who might well have made an Imperial marriage, seen in this? He had known such slight men by the dozens and twenties at Oxford, scant-minded, uncultured, clad like popinjays; and for this—this English nothing, this manling thing too slight for Wu Li Chang's hate, almost unworth his crushing—she had made the father that had adored and cherished her grandsire to a mongrel of shame. The pain at Wu Li Chang's heart was greater and gnawed sharper than that at Basil Gregory's. The Chinese was the bigger man, and paid the bigger penalty.
And Nang Ping had died for this: degraded herself beneath Chinese forgiveness, beyond pity, for this: disgraced him, her father, and the great ancestry of a thousand years for this! This!—and she might have been the bride of a man!—loved as he had loved her mother, cherished as he had cherished Wu Lu—and the mother of sons, honorable, love-begotten Chinese sons!
Almost Wu Li Chang's Chinese imperturbability cracked under his strain. His sorrow and his rage panted in his throat, battled, almost squealed aloud. But he was master yet a little, and he said smoothly, "Well, are your thumbs more comfortable?"
"If I were only free, I'd throttle you." Basil said it, of course, to cover his own terror—but, too, he meant it.
