Page:Mr. Wu (IA mrwumilnlouisejo00milniala).pdf/37

 he often had even from his cradle-days, of the women of their clan. There are several great families in China noted above all else for their women, and the Wu family was the most notable of all.

Most of the ladies Wu had been beautiful. Many of them had been great, wise, gifted, scholarly. Their paifangs speckled the home provinces. One had been espoused by an Emperor and had borne his more illustrious Emperor-son. All had been virtuous. All had been loved and obeyed. To treat their women well was an instinct with the Wus; to be proud of them an inheritance and a tradition.

Wu Li Chang just remembered his own mother, and his father's grief at her death. The father had died before he had laid aside the coarse white hempen garments of grief that he had worn for her. The epidemic of smallpox that had pitted the mandarin's face for a second time had killed the only son—the father of this one child.

A great-great-aunt of the mandarin's had been a noted mathematician. Another ancestress had invented an astronomical instrument still used in the great observatory at Pekin. On the distaff side the old man and the boy could prove descent from both the two great sages—descent in the male line from whom alone gives hereditary and titled nobility in China, except in such rare, Emperor-bestowed instances as that of Prince Kung. Wu Ching Yu and Wu Li Chang were descended through their mothers from Confucius and from Mencius. One foremother of theirs had written a book that still ranked high in Chinese classics, and one had worn the smallest shoes in all the eighteen provinces.

They had cause to be proud of their women, and to boast it intimately from generation to generation.