Bai Liusu was kneeling forlornly by her mother's bed. When she heard these words, she crushed the embroidered slipper against her chest. The needle that was stuck in the slipper pierced her hand, but she didn't feel any pain. "I can't live in this house any longer," she whispered. "I just can't!" Her voice was faint and floating, like a trailing tendril of dust. She felt as if she were dreaming, tendrils streaming from her face and head. Falling forward in a daze, she thought she was clasping her mother's knees, and she started sobbing aloud. "Mother, Mother, please help me!" Her mother's face remained blank as she smiled on without saying a word. Wrapping her arms around her mother's legs, Liusu shook her violently and cried, "Mother! Mother!"

In her daze, it was many years before: she was about ten years old, coming out of a theater, and in the middle of a tor-rential downpour she was separated from her family. She stood alone on the sidewalk staring at people, the people staring back at her, and beyond the dripping bus windows, on the other side of those blank glass shields, were strangers, an endless number of them, all locked inside their own little worlds, against which she could slam her head till it split and still she'd never man-age to break through. It seemed that she was trapped in a nightmare.

Suddenly she heard the sound of footsteps behind her, and guessed that her mother had returned. With a fierce effort she steadied herself, not saying anything. The mother she was pray-ing to and the mother she really had were two different people.

Someone walked over to the bed and sat down, but when she spoke, it was in Mrs. Xu's voice. Mrs. Xu chided her, "Sixth Young Lady, don't be upset. Get up, get up, the weather is so hot ..."

Bracing herself against the bed, Liusu struggled to her feet. "Auntie," she said, "I can't stay here in this house any longer. I've known for ages how much they resent me, even if they bite their tongues. But now that they've beat the drums, banged the gongs, and said it straight out, I've lost too much face to go on living here!"

Mrs. Xu made Liusu sit down with her on the edge of the bed. "You're too good, no wonder people bully you," she said tenderly. "Your older brothers played the market with your money until they'd spent it all! Even if they supported you for the rest of your life, it would only be right."

Liusu rarely heard such a decent remark. Without pausing to weigh its sincerity, she let her heart well up and her tears rain down. "Why was I such a fool? All because of that fuss over money, little bits of money, now I have no way out of here!"

Mrs. Xu said, "Someone so young can always find a way to make a life."

"If there were a way, I'd be long gone! I haven't studied much, and I can't do manual labor, so what kind of job can I do?"

"Looking for a job won't get you anywhere. But looking for a somebody, that's the way to go."

"No, I don't think so. My life is over already."

"That kind of talk is for the rich, for people who don't have to worry about food and clothing. People who don't have money can't just give up, even if they want to. Shave your head, become a nun, and when you beg for alms you'll still have to deal with people-you can't just leave the human race!"

Liusu bowed her head.

Mrs. Xu said, "If you'd come to me about this a few years ago it would have been better."

"Yes, that's right," said Liusu. "I'm already twenty-eight."

"For a person with your qualities, twenty-eight doesn't mat-ter. I'll keep you in mind. But I really should scold you—you've been divorced for seven or eight years now. If only you'd made up your mind earlier, you could have set yourself free and saved yourself a lot of grief!"

"Auntie, of course you know the situation. Would a family llke mine ever let us go out and meet people? And I can't de-pend on them to find me a match. First of all, they don't ap-prove, and even if they did, I have two younger sisters who are still unmarried, and then there are Third and Fourth Brothers' daughters, all growing up fast. They can't even manage for the younger ones. Why would they do anything for me?"

"Speaking of your sister," Mrs. Xu said, "I'm still waiting for their reply."

"Do things look good for Seventh Sister?" asked Liusu.

"I think we're getting close," said Mrs. Xu. "I wanted to let the ladies talk it over among themselves, so I said I'd come up here to look in on you. I'd better be getting back now. Would you go down with me?"

Liusu had to help Mrs. Xu down the stairs. The stairs were old and Mrs. Xu was large: they creaked and squeaked down the stairs together. They entered the drawing room, and Liusu wanted to light the lamps, but Mrs. Xu said, "Don't bother, we can see well enough. The others are in the east wing. You come with me, and we'll all have a nice chat, and that way everything will be smoothed over. Otherwise, tomorrow when it's time to eat, and you can't avoid seeing them, it will be awkward and unpleasant."

Liusu couldn't bear hearing that phrase "time to eat." Her heart ached and her throat went dry. Forcing a smile, she de-murred. "Thank you very much, Auntie, but I'm not feeling very well right now-1 really can't see anyone. I'm afraid I'd be so nervous that I'd say something disastrous, and that would be a terrible way to repay all your kindness."

Seeing that Liusu refused to budge, Mrs. Xu decided to leave things where they stood. She went in by herself.

As soon as the door closed behind her, the drawing room fell into shadow. Two squares of yellow light streamed in through the glass panes in the upper part of the door, landing on the green tile floor. In spite of the gloom, one could see, on the bookshelves that lined the walls, long rows of slipcases made of purplish sandalwood into which formal-script characters had been carved, then painted green. On a plain wooden table in the middle of the room, there was a cloisonné chiming clock with a glass dome over it. The clock was broken; it hadn't worked in years. There were two hanging scrolls with paired verses; the crimson paper of the scrolls was embossed with gold "longevity" characters, over which the verses had been in-scribed in big, black strokes. In the dim light, each word seemed to float in emptiness, far from the paper's surface. Liusu felt like one of those words, drifting and unconnected. The Bai household was a fairyland where a single day, creeping slowly by, was a thousand years in the outside world. But if you spent a thousand years here, all the days would be the same, each one as flat and dull as the last one.

She crossed her arms and clasped her neck with her hands. Seven, eight years-they'd gone by in the blink of an eye. Are you still young? Don't worry, in another few years you'll be old, and anyway youth isn't worth much here. They've got youth everywhere-children born one after another, with their bright new eyes, their tender new mouths, their quick new wits. Time grinds on, year after year, and the eyes grow dull, the minds grow dull, and then another round of children is born. The older ones are sucked into that obscure haze of crimson and gold, and the tiny flecks of glinting gold are the frightened eyes of their predecessors.

Liusu cried out, covered her eyes, and fled; her feet beat a rapid retreat up the stairs to her own room. She turned on the lamp, moved it to her dressing table, and studied her reflection in the mirror. Good enough: she wasn't too old yet. She had the kind of slender figure that doesn't show age-her waist eter-nally thin, her breasts girlishly budding. Her face had always been as white as porcelain, but now it had changed from por-celain to jade-semitranslucent jade with a tinge of pale green. Once, her cheeks had been plump; now they were drawn, so that her small face seemed smaller yet, and even more attrac-tive. Her face was fairly narrow, but her eyes were set well apart. They were clear, lively, and slightly coquettish.

Out on the balcony, Fourth Master had once again taken up his huqin. The tune rose and fell, and Liusu's head tilted to one side as her eyes and hands started moving through dance poses. As she performed in the mirror, the huqin no longer sounded like a huqin, but like strings and flutes playing a solemn court dance. She took a few paces to the right, then a few to the left. Her steps seemed to trace the lost rhythms of an ancient melody.

Suddenly, she smiled—a private, malevolent smile; the music came to a discordant halt. The huqin went on playing outside, but it was telling tales of fealty and filial piety, chastity and righteousness: distant tales that had nothing to do with her.

Fourth Master had retreated to the balcony because he knew he lacked standing in the family council downstairs. Once Mrs. Xu had left, the Bai family had to thoroughly assess every aspect of her proposal. Mrs. Xu planned to help Baolu make a match with a Mr. Fan, who had recently been working quite closely with Mr. Xu in the mining business. Mrs. Xu had always kept track of his family and their situation, and she believed him to be entirely reliable. Mr. Fan's father was a well-known overseas Chinese with properties scattered throughout Ceylon, Malaya, and other such places. Fan Liuyuan was now thirty-two years old, and both of his parents had passed away.

Everyone in the Bai family kept asking Mrs. Xu how such a perfect son-in-law could still be single, and she told them that when Fan Liuyuan returned from England, a whole passel of mothers had forcefully, insistently, pushed their daughters at him. They had schemed and squabbled, pulling every trick in the book and making a huge fuss over him. This had com-pletely spoiled Mr. Fan; from then on he took women to be so much mud under his feet. He'd always been a bit odd anyway, due to his unusual childhood-his parents weren't officially married. His father met his mother in London, when he was touring Europe. She was an overseas Chinese, a girl often seen at parties, and the marriage had been kept secret. Then Fan's first wife got wind of it. Fearing that the first wife would take revenge, the couple never dared to go back to China, and Fan Liuyuan grew up in England. After his father's death, Liuyuan sought legal recognition of his rights; even though the first wife had only daughters, two of them, there was still quite a bit of nastiness. He was all alone in England, and went through some hard times, but at last he got the right to inherit his father's estate. The Fan family was still very hostile toward him, so he lived in Shanghai most of the time, returning to the family home in Guangzhou only when absolutely necessary. The un-stable emotional environment of his early years had left its mark on him, and gradually he became a playboy—he gam-bled, he gourmandized, he visited prostitutes. The only pleas-ure he denied himself was married bliss.

"A man like this is probably very picky," said. Fourth Mistress. "I'm afraid he might look down on Seventh Sister because she's the daughter of a concubine. It would be a shame to lose so good a connection!"

"But he too is the child of a secondary wife," said Third Master.