The Good Earth (House of Earth, #1)

by Pearl S. Buck

“Now and it need not be so,” answered Wang Lung in argument. “When I was a lad I had no such melancholy and no such weepings and tempers, and no slaves, either.” O-lan waited and then she answered slowly, “I have not indeed seen it thus except with young lords. You worked on the land. But he is like a young lord and he is idle in the house.” Wang Lung was surprised, after he had pondered a while, for he saw truth in what she said. It was true that when he himself was a lad there was no time for melancholy, for he had to be up at dawn for the ox and out with the plow and the hoe and at harvest he must needs work until his back broke, and if he wept he could weep for no one heard him, and he could not run away as his son ran away from school, for if he did there was nothing for him to eat on return, and so he was compelled to labor. He remembered all this and he said to himself, “But my son is not thus. He is more delicate than I was, and his father is rich and mine was poor, and there is no need for his labor, for I have labor in my fields, and besides, one cannot take a scholar such as my son is and set him to the plow.” And he was secretly proud that he had a son like this and so he said to O-lan,