“Oh, dear! Oh, dear!” cried his aunt, Princess Autumn Cloud. “The Little Emperor is bored! What shall we do, oh, what shall we do to amuse him? For when he is bored, he very soon grows naughty, and when he is naughty—oh, dear!”
And she began to cry. But then she was always crying. When she was born her father and mother named her Bright Yellow Butterfly Floating In The Sunshine, but she cried so much that by the time she was five years old they saw that name wouldn’t do at all, and changed it to Autumn Cloud Pouring Down Rain Upon The Sad Gray Sea.
She cried about anything. If her Lady-In-Waiting brought her a bowl of tea with honeysuckle blossoms in it, she would cry because they weren’t jasmine flowers. If they were jasmine, she would cry because they weren’t honeysuckle. When the peach trees bloomed she would cry because that meant that spring had come, and that meant summer would soon follow, and then autumn, and then the cold winter. “And oh, how cold the wind will be then, and how fast the snow will fall!” sobbed Princess Autumn Cloud, looking through her tears at the bright pink peach blossoms.
She cried because her sea-green jacket was embroidered with storks instead of bamboo trees.
She cried because they brought her shark-fin soup in a bowl of green lacquer with a gold dragon twisting around it, instead of a red lacquer bowl with a silver dragon.
She cried if the weather was hot.
She cried if the weather was cold.
And hardest of all she cried whenever the Little Emperor was naughty.
Whenever she began to cry a Lady-In-Waiting knelt in front of her and caught her tears in a golden bowl, for it never would have done to let them run down her cheeks, like an ordinary person’s tears; they would have washed such deep roads through the thick white powder on her face. Every morning Princess Autumn Cloud (and, indeed, every lady in the Court of the Little Emperor) covered her face with honey in which white jasmine petals had been crushed to make it smell sweet, then when she was all sticky she put on powder until her face was as white as an egg. Then she painted on very surprised-looking black eyebrows and a little mouth as red and round as a blob of sealing wax. It looked just as if her mouth were an important letter that had to be sealed up to keep all sorts of secrets from escaping. Princess Autumn Cloud and Princess Gentle Breeze and Lady Gleaming Dragon Fly and Lady Moon Seen Through The Mist and all the rest of them would have thought it as shocking to appear without paint and powder covering up their faces as they would have thought it to appear without any clothes.