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 CHAPTER XIV

Sing Kung Yah was away temporarily from her important post as Wu Nang Ping's chaperone-guard, spending a few weeks of semi-religious villeggiatura in a Taoist nunnery with a kinswoman who was its abbess.

So powerful was Wu's personality and his wealth that he had been able to command for his widowed kinswoman and for her participation in the gala things of life, even from the most conventional of his countrymen, considerable courteous toleration. But it was toleration only, and never approval. His influence was enormous. Every tong in China would have torn at the vitals of any one rash enough to exercise against Sing Kung Yah a social ostracism contrary to his wish. And so the unprecedented festivity of the kinswoman's widowhood was tolerated even by the Chinese whom it both shocked and affronted.

But anything more, or kindlier, than tolerance, even the great Wu was powerless to win for her—at least from the Chinese. And both he and she knew this, and it was the one fly in her very nice amber. She would have been ostracized fiercely if those of their own caste had dared; but, they not daring, she was tolerated coldly. And feeling it (approving it even in her thoroughly Chinese heart) she was often glad to steal away into the quiet, and behind the screen, of the Taoist nunnery on the cool, far-off hillside.