To-day you stopped on the street with her. Not an hour ago.
Half an hour by the clock you talked.--What is that?"
"It was the thrice-accursed telephone," Ah Kim muttered, while she
suspended the stick to catch what he said. "Mrs. Chang Lucy told
you. I know she did. I saw her see me. I shall have the
telephone taken out. It is of the devil."
"It is a device of all the devils," Mrs. Tai Fu agreed, taking a
fresh grip on the stick. "Yet shall the telephone remain. I like
to talk with Mrs. Chang Lucy over the telephone."
"She has the eyes of ten thousand cats," quoth Ah Kim, ducking and
receiving the stick stinging on his knuckles. "And the tongues of
ten thousand toads," he supplemented ere his next duck.
"She is an impudent-faced and evil-mannered hussy," Mrs. Tai Fu
accented.
"Mrs. Chang Lucy was ever that," Ah Kim murmured like the dutiful
son he was.
"I speak of Li Faa," his mother corrected with stick emphasis.
"She is only half Chinese, as you know. Her mother was a shameless
kanaka. She wears skirts like the degraded haole women--also
corsets, as I have seen for myself.
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