Chinese Literature

The little boy began to scream and kick. The matchmaker took him outside. When the young woman was in the sedan-chair, she said,

“You'd better take the boy in, it’s raining outside.”

Inside the house, resting his head on the palm of his hand, sat the little boy’s father, motionless and wordless.

The two villages were thirty li apart, but the chair carriers reached their destination without making a single stop on the way. The young woman’s clothes were wet from the spring raindrops which had been blown in through the sedan-chair screens. An elderly woman, of about fifty-five, with a plump face and shrewd eyes came out to greet her. Realizing immediately that this was the scholar’s wife, the young woman looked at her bashfully and remained silent. As the scholar’s wife was amiably helping the young woman to the door, there came out from the house a tall and thin elderly man with a round, smooth face. Measuring the young woman from head to foot, he smiled and said,

“You have come early. Did you get wet in the rain?”

His wife, completely ignoring what he was saying, asked the young woman,

“Have you left anything in the sedan-chair?”

“No, nothing,” answered the young woman.

Soon they were inside the house. Outside the gate, a number of women from the neighbourhood had gathered and were peeping in to see what was happening.

Somehow or other, the young woman could not help thinking about her old home and Chun Pao. Asa matter of fact, she might have congratulated herself on the prospects of spending the next three years here, since both her new home and her temporary husband seemed pleasant. The scholar was really kind and soft-spoken. His wife appeared hospitable and talkative. She talked about her thirty years of happy married life with the scholar. She had given birth to a boy some fifteen years before—a really handsome and lively child, she said—but he died of smallpox less than ten months after his birth. Since then, she had never had another child. The elderly woman hinted she had long been urging her husband to get a concubine but he had always put it off—either

because he was too much in love with his wedded wife or because he

couldn’t find a suitable woman for a concubine. This chatter made the young woman feel sad, delighted and depressed by turns. Finally, the young woman was told what was expected of her. She blushed when the scholar’s wife said,

“You've had three or four children. Of course you know what to do. You know much more than I do.”

After this, the elderly woman went away.

That evening, the scholar told the young woman a great many things about his family in an effort to ingratiate himself with her. She was

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