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Q’ūo Xink, the half-Nosu grandmother, advised marriage. Q’ūo Chung fell into quick rage, and answered the old-one more abruptly than a Chinese should retort to an ancestor, even a living ancestor. Q’ūo Ssu was but a child-one. She should wear no red-veiled bride-crown for many on many a moon. The grandmother shrugged good-naturedly, and let it go. Despite her Nosu blood, she was not dominant of temper; she cared more to be at ease and at peace than she did to rule; and she cared little about it either way. Her years had bent and wearied her, and the old-one was selfish.

But Q’ūo Chung’s conscience thorned him. He knew that his reluctance to part with Q’ūo Ssu made the girl’s going to marriage abhorrent to him far more than her few tender years did. His conscience pricked him, and he pondered day after day, and communed with his long water-pipe night after night what he could find to give or to do that would bring her old gayness and zest to Q’ūo Ssu. The others prated and cackled together shrilly about it. Q’ūo Chung sat apart and thought.

And he found it. Q’ūo Chung himself thought out the cure of Q’ūo Ssu, announced it jubilantly and with rock-firm determination to the amazed and appalled family, and never suspected that Q’ūo Ssu had put the idea into his troubled head.

“Carry the tender-one with you when you go to Sze-ch’uen to deliver the wax-worms! You are mad to make the long-perilled journey yourself,” Q’ūo Zat, his wife, wailed. “To take the girl-one would be to throw her to the forest wolves. Better and kinder to bind her arms and legs, tie a heavy rock at her girdle, and pitch her into the Great River where its torrents are fiercest and its Dragon cruellest. That end would be quick—a kindness matched against what you speak you will do. Sooner than suffer it, I, her mother, will feed her full of poppy, and slay her while she sleeps.”

Q’ūo Chung smiled—all a woman’s railing was worth.

Q’ūo Ssu giggled.

Q’ūo Zat, the wife and mother, said more. She scarcely had begun. She said a very great deal more. She shrilled it with oaths, she sobbed it with tears.

Q’ūo Chung continued to smile.

Q’ūo Ssu continued to giggle.

They had made up their minds. Q’ūo Zat was welcome to say and to storm what she would. So were they all. But no one else troubled to say anything. For they all knew—including perturbed (and perhaps a little jealous) Q’ūo Zat herself—that when Q’ūo Chung and Q’ūo Ssu had made up their minds, and made them up alike, no one else, no combination of others, would influence them. The herd mind counted for little, the herd will counted for nothing, in the home of Q’ūo Chung, where only Q’ūo Chung and Q’ūo Ssu ruled.

But at last, “Hush! Speak no more!” patient Q’ūo Chung commanded. “I will eat now. When I have eaten and pulled my pipe for an hour I will sleep. You have heard, woman. Obey.”

Q’ūo Zat rose and shuffled off angrily. No one else spoke. Presently she shuffled back bringing Q’ūo Chung his heated rice-wine. She offered it to him, sulky but meek, and stood before him to refill his cup again and again while Q’ūo Ssu and the servants laid his stew of pounded duck and sweet potatoes on the low table beside his chair. They all served him, his servants and women—all but the old grandmother half adoze (or pretending to be) with her pipe, on her stool by the fire.

“A man fed with white rice, warmed with wine, and his poppy-pipe well lit, can be led like a child.” Q’ūo Zat had found the adage reliable at times. She tested it now.

“To journey at breakneck pace all through the night, to swelter all day by the rough roadside,” she began pleadingly.

Q’ūo Chung smiled at her lazily through the smoke-curls of his pipe.

“Q’ūo Ssu goes with me,” he said. “She shall journey like a Manchu princess. She shall go safe and sit soft; and so shall she return.”

“If she returns!” his wife gibed darkly.

Q’ūo Ssu dimpled, but Q’ūo Chung frowned at last. “Wish you that I divorce you, over-talkative woman?”

The woman paled and cowered at his threat. Its terrible fulfilment was in his power; as it is within the power of every Chinese husband in those primitive, conventional parts of China where the good old manners and customs of Old China still persist, where the authority of the old laws still runs. “We start when the moon’s new sickle first cuts through the sky. See you that the lily-one is ready.”

“I will be ready,” Q’ūo Ssu gurgled up at him from her seat at his feet.

“I dare stand pledge you will,” the father retorted. “See you, Q’ūo Zat, that she is well plenished—garments and quilts; all that makes a young lily-one’s comfort. Omit nothing. Forget nothing. At your peril!”

“What slave-women will attend her?” his wife asked.

“That point I will consider, and I will give you my command of it to-morrow. We will speak no more of it to-night.”

Q’ūo Zat said no more. But she let her lip curl. Well she knew that Q’ūo Chung’s considering of the point she had raised would be in consultation with Q’ūo Ssu.

A little jealous sometimes of her own daughter, and not without cause, yet the unpampered wife loved her girl child well. Many a taper she lit to Kwan Yin-ko, many an hour she knelt alone before Kwan, and prayed the Hearer-of-cries that Q’ūo Ssu might be given only to kindness in marriage. With what bitterness might not Ssu miss Q’ūo Chung her father, pine and wilt for his indulgence and tenderness!

Many a Chinese gives his daughter a sunnier, fuller comradeship than his wife ever wins. Q’ūo Zat’s anxious prayer was not without grave reason.