Relatives and friends protested vigorously against such apparent indifference to their daughter's future on the part of her parents. "You will never be able to get a mother-in-law for her," they declared. Mr. and Mrs. Shih felt, no doubt, that this was true; for who could have then prophesied that the time would so soon come in conservative old China when young men would not only be willing to marry girls with natural feet, but would decidedly prefer them! Maiyü's father and mother never reconsidered their decision that their daughter should grow to womanhood with natural feet; but they did try to devise some plan by which her life might be a useful and happy one, even though she might never enjoy the blessing of a mother-in-law. They were very much impressed with the service which Dr. Kate Bushnell was rendering the suffering women and children of Kiukiang, and when Maiyü was eight years old her father took her to Dr. Bushnell and announced, "Here is my little girl. I want you to make a doctor of her." This was almost as startling as the unbound feet! A Chinese woman physician was unknown and undreamed of. But this young father's faith in the possibilities of Chinese womanhood was not to be discouraged. The necessity of general education, preliminary to medical training, was explained, and Maiyü was put in charge of Miss Howe, then at the head of the Girls' Boarding School of the Methodist Mission. In this school she spent most of the next ten years of her life, studying in both Chinese and English, and fitting herself under Miss Howe's direction for her medical course. In 1892, Maiyü and her friend, Ida Kahn, accompanied Miss Howe to America, there to receive the medical education for which they had long been preparing. If America held much that was new and interesting to them, it was no less true that they were something new and very interesting to America. "What makes these girls look so different from the other Chinese women who come here?" the Government official who examined their passports asked Miss Howe. "All the difference between a heathen and a Christian," was her prompt response. That there were Chinese girls who could successfully pass the entrance examinations to the medical department of the University of Michigan, in arithmetic, algebra, rhetoric, general and United States history, physics, and Latin, was a revelation to the people of America, and their college career was watched with the greatest interest.