Page:Mr. Wu (IA mrwumilnlouisejo00milniala).pdf/66

 CHAPTER X

The years passed, and Wu took no other wife. Time enough, he reasoned; and while he devoted himself, body and soul and seething, subtle intellect, to the big tasks he had set himself and had had set him by the old mandarin long ago, the bachelor habit grew upon him and encrusted him with its self-sufficient and not unselfish little customs, as it does so many men of Europe. Perhaps in this and in some other things Europe had marked and tinged him more than he knew.

Except for his wifelessness, he kept all such establishment as a Chinese gentleman should; there were flower-girls in his retinue and much in his life of which Ellen Muir would have disapproved violently.

He had felt no disappointment at the sex of his first-born. Perhaps his grief (it was very great) at Wu Lu's death made him indifferent to the great sex-blemish in the child. Or possibly his descent from Queen Yenfi and from a score of ladies little less able or less famed gave him an unconscious estimate of the woman-sex strangely un-Chinese—unless China be misreported.

Mrs. Li had petitioned for the custody of the babe, but Wu had refused sternly. "She is a Wu. She stays with Wu." But he conceded a point—a minor point. A younger sister of Mrs. Li's was widowed at about the time of Wu Lu's death, widowed while still a bride and childless. She begged to come and be foster-mother and servant to the motherless babe; and Wu had consented