“Won me!” I cried, unheeding who heard me. “Yes, honorably and like a
man. And what are you that dare sneer at one like him. For all your six
feet of grossness, your small soul cannot measure up to his great one.
You were unwilling to protect and care for the woman who was your wife
or the little child you caused to come into this world; but he succored
and saved the stranger woman, treated her as a woman, with reverence and
respect; gave her child a home, and made them both independent, not only
of others but of himself. Now, hearing you insult him behind his back, I
know, what I did not know before—that I love him, and all I have to say
to you is, Go!”
And James Carson went. I heard of him again but once. That was when the
papers reported his death of apoplexy while exercising at a public
gymnasium.
Loving Liu Kanghi, I became his wife, and though it is true that there
are many Americans who look down upon me for so becoming, I have never
regretted it. No, not even when men cast upon me the glances they cast
upon sporting women. I accept the lot of the American wife of an humble
Chinaman in America. The happiness of the man who loves me is more to me
than the approval or disapproval of those who in my dark days left me to
die like a dog. My Chinese husband has his faults. He is hot-tempered
and, at times, arbitrary; but he is always a man, and has never sought
to take away from me the privilege of being but a woman. I can lean upon
and trust in him. I feel him behind me, protecting and caring for me,
and that, to an ordinary woman like myself, means more than anything
else.
Only when the son of Liu Kanghi lays his little head upon my bosom do I
question whether I have done wisely. For my boy, the son of the Chinese
man, is possessed of a childish wisdom which brings the tears to my
eyes; and as he stands between his father and myself, like yet unlike us
both, so will he stand in after years between his father’s and his
mother’s people. And if there is no kindliness nor understanding between
them, what will my boy’s fate be?