experienced the helping financial hand of Ah Chun.

So it was that Honolulu watched his wonderful family grow up into a
perplexing problem and secretly sympathized with him, for it was
beyond any of them to imagine what he was going to do with it. But
Ah Chun saw the problem more clearly than they. No one knew as he
knew the extent to which he was an alien in his family. His own
family did not guess it. He saw that there was no place for him
amongst this marvellous seed of his loins, and he looked forward to
his declining years and knew that he would grow more and more alien.
He did not understand his children. Their conversation was of
things that did not interest him and about which he knew nothing.
The culture of the West had passed him by. He was Asiatic to the
last fibre, which meant that he was heathen. Their Christianity was
to him so much nonsense. But all this he would have ignored as
extraneous and irrelevant, could he have but understood the young
people themselves. When Maud, for instance, told him that the
housekeeping bills for the month were thirty thousand--that he
understood, as he understood Albert's request for five thousand with
which to buy the schooner yacht Muriel and become a member of the
Hawaiian Yacht Club. But it was their remoter, complicated desires
and mental processes that obfuscated him. He was not slow in
learning that the mind of each son and daughter was a secret
labyrinth which he could never hope to tread. Always he came upon
the wall that divides East from West. Their souls were inaccessible
to him, and by the same token he knew that his soul was inaccessible
to them.

Besides, as the years came upon him, he found himself harking back
more and more to his own kind. The reeking smells of the Chinese