"I guess the lady wouldn't enjoy butting in at a funeral," said Nick.
"No, she wouldn't!" Angela added hastily. "But I should love to see them playing fan-fan--isn't that what they call the gambling game?--and--and smoking opium."
"Afraid the gambling can't be managed," said Mr. Jacob Schermerhorn, sadly shaking his head, as if the good days were gone. "But you'd like a little curio store I'll take you to--owned by an American lady married to a Chinese, and wearing the costume. They sell relics of the fire. And a joss-house is interesting----"
"But the opium smoking----" Angela persisted, suspecting that he meant to slide off the subject.
"That's not easy. Opium smoking's forbidden, and----"
But Angela grew obstinate. "I shan't feel I've seen Chinatown unless I've seen that. The books say it goes on."
"It does, on the quiet--_very_ quiet! But they're scared to death of being found out. Besides----"
"Well, ma'am, your husband said when he engaged me he thought it would be best not to try and get you into any such place. It might hurt your feelings."
"Oh!" exclaimed Angela. Her "feelings," if not hurt, were in commotion. "He--he _isn't_ my husband."
Then she wondered if it would not have been better to have kept silence, and let the man think what he pleased. He would never see or hear of her again. She laughed to show Nick that she was not embarrassed, and then hurried on. "I _must_ see them smoking!"
"It would make you feel mighty sad, Mrs. May," said Nick. "I went once, and--it kind of haunted me. I thought to myself, I'd never take a woman who had a heart----"
"I haven't a heart," laughed Angela, piqued. "I've only a will. But--you're my host, so I suppose I shall have to give my will up to yours."
To her surprise, Nick did not yield. "We'd better begin with the singing children," he said to Schermerhorn, "and then we won't feel we're keeping them up late."
The guide led them through Dupont Street, the street of the bazaars, and another smaller, less noisy street, where fat, long-gowned men, and women with gold clasps in their glittering edifices of ebony hair, chaffered for dried abalones, green sugarcane, and Chinese nuts. In basements they could see through half-open doors at the bottom of ladderlike steps, earnest-faced men, with long, well-tended queues of hair, busily tonsuring sleepy clients. Stooping merchants, with wrinkled brown masks like the soft shells of those nuts which others sold, could be discerned in dim, tiny offices, poring through huge round spectacles as they wrote with paint brushes, in volumes apparently made of brown paper. Here and there, in a badly lit shop with a greenish glass window, an old chemist with the air of a wizard was measuring out for a blue-coated customer an ounce of dried lizard flesh, some powdered shark's eggs, or slivered horns of mountain deer. These things would cure chills and fever; many other diseases, too, and best of all, win love denied, or frighten away bad spirits.