fifteen years old, younger than yourself, and yet he was able to chatter glibly away, while you do not even understand it. Shame on you! Now go and look it up for me!"
Hsueh-cheng answered with a throaty "yes" and backed out respectfully.
"The students are getting more and more impossible every day," Ssu-ming said indignantly after a while. "Even as far back as the Kuang Hsu period, I was one of the most outspoken advocates of modern education. But I never, never thought that schools would come to this: it is emancipation this and freedom that, but they never learn anything. I have spent lots of money on Hsueh-cheng, and it has all been spent in vain. It was with considerable difficulty that I got him into one of these schools where both Chinese and Western learning are given equal attention. You would think that he ought to learn something there, wouldn't you? And yet after a year he cannot even understand o-du-foo. They must be still teaching them by rote. What sort of school do you call this? What have they turned out? I say they should be closed up, every one of them!"
"You are right, you can't do better than to close all of them," Mrs. Ssu said sympathetically, still engaged in making paper ingots.
"We don't need to send Hsiu-erh and Chao-erh to school. 'What's the use of sending girls to school?' Great Uncle Nine used to say, and how I attacked him for his opposition to girls' schools! But now I am inclined to think the old people are right after all. Just think, isn't it bad enough to have women parading about the streets, without their bobbing their hair? There is nothing I hate more than girl students with bobbed hair. In my opinion soldiers and bandits are
