ney in the bank next time," warned his employer sharply,
"instead of letting it lie round in some flimsy Chinee junk shop. They're
always burning."

Lew Wee regarded her with a stilled face.

"Can happen!" he again murmured.

He was the least bit insistent, as if she could not yet have heard
this utterly sufficing truth. Then he was out; and a moment later the
two-stringed fiddle whined a little song through two closed doors.

I said something acute and original about the ingrained fatalism of the
Oriental races.

Ma Pettengill laid down her paper, put aside her glasses, and said, yes,
Chinee one fatal race; feeling fatal thataway was what made 'em such good
help. Because why? Because, going to work at such-and-such a place, this
here fatal feeling made 'em think one place was no worse than another; so
why not stick here? If other races felt as fatal as the Chinee race it
would make a grand difference in the help problem. She'd bet a million
dollars right now that a lot of people wished the Swedes and Irish had
fatal feelings like that.

I said Lew Wee had the look of one ever expecting the worst; even more
than the average of his race.

"It ain't that," said my hostess. "He don't expect anything at all; or
mebbe everything. He takes what comes. If it's good or bad, he says, 'Can
happen!' in the same tone of voice; and that ends it. There he is now,
knowing that all this good money he saved by hard labour has gone up in
smoke, and paying the loss no more attention that if he'd merely broke a
string on that squeaky long-necked contraption he saws."

"He seems careless enough with his money, certainly."

"Sure, because he don't believe it does the least good to be careful."

From a cloth sack the speaker poured tobacco into a longitudinally
creased brown paper and adeptly fashioned something in the nature of a
cigarette.

"Ain't I been telling him for a year to buy Liberty Bonds with his money?
He did buy two, being very pro-American on account of once having a
violent difference with a German; and he's impressed with the button
the Government lets him wear for it. He feels like the President has made
him a mandarin or something; but if the whole Government went flooey
to-morrow he'd just say, 'Can happen!' and pick up his funny fiddle. Of
course it ain't human, but it helps to keep help. I had him six years
now, and the only thing that can't happen is his leaving. I don't say
there wasn't reasons why he firs