"You have been very clever," he said, "far more clever than these other women of my household, I see. My affection, I notice, has paid you well in the last few months."
Kuei-lien smiled, not troubling to deny the greed he had uncovered.
"Cleverness is always costly," she remarked.
"Yes, you are right, it should be."
The man wrote a check larger than any of his previous rewards; he read the sum before her eyes.
"It is unsigned, you observe," he explained. "Now show me if you are clever enough to win my signature to this piece of paper."
This was temptation the concubine relished. She led the man through every extreme of her sensual imagination, but even when beguiled into amorous confusion by her beauty she found him obstinate in paying the price of her victory, as though he had locked the gate to his treasure, locked the gate and discarded the key. Kuei-lien fell back upon the last resource of her trade. She provoked him to cruelty. She stood the sting of the lash across her naked shoulders, smiling grimly, biting her lips to keep from crying out in pain, quivering but not shrinking from each fresh agony of his fury, till the time came when he fell, sobbing like a baby, on his couch, exhausted in spirit, ashamed of the mordant brutality which would have been accounted vile from a beast. It was easy, in his repentant mood, to secure the signature of the check.
While the ordeal was livid in her memory, the girl bargained her stripes against the cupidity of the t'ai-t'ai, refusing downright to face more of this abuse till she had got her share of the gains greatly increased.
The t'ai-t'ai needed to keep her husband occupied, since she was trying, for the first time in years, to win some control over Nancy. In the interests of her own family, the family to which the girl was betrothed, she had specious excuses of duty for overseeing the occupations of the girl. She dismissed Nancy's teacher; what time was there, she asked, for further frivolities of study in a girl who had learned already too much for her own and her husband's good? To her surprise, Nancy submitted without complaint, submitted so gracefully that the t'ai-t'ai suspected some darkly cherished plot and went further in her exactions, shortening the hours of Nancy's play in the garden, setting her heavy tasks of sewing upon her bridal garments.
Nancy was unbelievably docile. She was not reconciled to the t'ai-t'ai's show of authority, which came with a bad grace after the many years she had been left to go her own willful path. But the t'ai-t'ai for the moment was too powerful and she was doing, after all, only what Nancy recognized she had a right to do, making the girl a meet and seemly wife for her nephew. The marriage lurked inescapably in front of her; Nancy had neither thought nor plan of evading her engagement. It was no use making enemies of the family to which she must go, the family to which the t'ai-t'ai, though she had left it, still seemed more closely related than to Herrick's improvised house. Meekly Nancy bent her face over the scarlet satin of her bridal gown and meditated all the gloomy, curious, fearful, teasing thoughts which the mere color of the garments stirred in her virgin mind.