“Chinkie-Toodles,” she said the day before the wedding, and the gleam in her eyes gave point to the words, “I’m square—see? An’ I’m goin’ to travel square. Maybe I haven’t always been a poifec’ lady, but I ain’t goin’ to bilk yer, get me? But—” She looked up, and suddenly, had Nag Hong Fah known it, the arrogance, the clamorings, and the tragedy of her mixed blood were in the words that followed: “I gotta have a dose of freedom. I’m an American—I’m white—say!”—seeing the smile which he hid rapidly behind his fat hand—“yer needn’t laugh. I _am_ white, an’ not a painted Chinese doll. No sittin’ up an’ mopin’ for the retoin of my fat, yellow lord an’ master in a stuffy, stinky, punky five-by-four cage for me! In other woids, I resoive for my little golden-haired self the freedom of asphalt an’ electric lights, see? An’ I’ll play square—as long as you’ll play square,” she added under her breath. “Sure,” he said. “You are free. Why not? I am an American. Have a drink?” And they sealed the bargain in a tumbler of Chinese rice whisky, cut with Bourbon, and flavored with aniseed and powdered ginger. ―――― The evening following the wedding, husband and wife, instead of a honeymoon trip, went on an alcoholic spree amid the newly varnished splendors of their Pell Street flat. Side by side, in spite of the biting December cold, they leaned from the open window and brayed an intoxicated pæan at the Elevated structure which pointed at the stars like a gigantic icicle stood on end, frozen, austere—desolate, for all its clank and rattle, amid the fragrant, warm reek of China which drifted from shutters and cellar-gratings. Nag Hong Fah, seeing Yung Long crossing the street, thought with drunken sentimentality of Yung Long’s sister whom he had divorced because she had borne him no children, and extended a boisterous invitation to come up. “Come! Have a drink!” he hiccuped. Yung Long stopped, looked, and refused courteously, but not before he had leveled a slow, appraising glance at the golden-haired Mei Hi, who was shouting by the side of her obese lord. Yung Long was not a bad-looking man, standing there in the flickering light of the street-lamp, the black shadows cutting the pale-yellow, silky sheen of his narrow, powerful face as clean as with a knife. “Swell looker, that Chink!” commented Fanny Mei Hi as Yung Long walked away; and her husband, the liquor warming his heart into generosity, agreed: “Sure! Swell looker! Lots of money! Let’s have another drink!” Arrived at the sixth tumbler, Nag Hong Fah, the poet in his soul released by alcohol, took his blushing bride upon his knee and improvised a neat Cantonese love-ditty; but when Fanny awakened the next morning with the sobering suspicion that she had tied herself for life to a drunkard, she found out that her suspicion was unfounded.