Little Bow Kum was bought and sold, as was well understood by both Wong Hi, the father, and the man who chinked down his hard three hundred silver dollars as the price, with the purpose of rearing her to a profession which, while not without honor among Orientals, is frowned upon by the white devils, and never named by them in best society. Much pains were bestowed upon her education; for her owner held that in the trade which at the age of fifteen she was to take up, she should be able to paint, embroider, quote Confucius, recite verses, and in all things be a mirror of the graces. Thus she would be more valuable, being more attractive. Little Bow Kum accepted her fate and made no protest, feeling no impulse so to do. She knew that she had been sold, and knew her destiny; but she felt no shock, was stricken by no desire to escape. What had happened and would happen, had been for hundreds and thousands of years the life story of a great feminine fraction of her people. Wherefore, the thought was at home in her blood; her nature bowed to and embraced it. Of course, from the white devils' view-point the fate designed for little Bow Kum was as the sublimation of the immoral. But you must remember that morality is always a question of geography and sometimes a question of race. Climates, temperatures, also play their part. Then, too, there is that element of support. In the tropics, where life is lazy, easy, and one may pick a dinner from every tree, man is polygamous. In the ice locked arctics, where one spears his dinner out of the cold, reluctant sea, and goes days and days without it, man is polyandrous, and one wife has many husbands. In the temperate zone, where life is neither soft nor hard and yet folk work to live, man is monogamous, and one wife to one husband is the only good form. Great is latitude! Take the business of steeping the senses in drinks or drugs. That eternal quantity of latitude still worms its way into the equation. In the arctic zone they drink raw alcohol, in the north temperate whiskey, in the south temperate wine, while in the tropics they give up drinking and take to opium, hasheesh and cocaine. Little Bow Kum watched her fifteenth year approach--that year when she would take up her profession--without shame, scandal or alarm. Had you tried to show her the horrors of her situation, she wouldn't have understood. She was beautiful beyond beauty. This she knew very well, and was pleased to have her charms confessed. Her owner told her she was a lamp of love, and that he would not sell her under $3,000. This of itself was the prettiest of compliments, since he had never before asked more than $2,000 for a girl. Koi Ton, two years older than herself, had brought just $2,000; and Koi Ton was acknowledged to be a vision from heaven. And so when Bow Kum learned that her price was to be $3,000, a glow overspread her--a glow which comes to beauty when it feels itself supreme.