At these words, Tai-yü felt inclined to betake herself back at once; but Hsi Jen smiled and said: "Please stop, miss. Here's a slip of paper, and see what there is on it!" and speedily taking what Pao-yü had written a short while back, she handed it over to Tai-yü to examine. Tai-yü, on perusal, discovered that Pao-yü had composed it, at the spur of the moment, when under the influence of resentment; and she could not help thinking it both a matter of ridicule as well as of regret; but she hastily explained to Hsi Jen: "This is written for fun, and there's nothing of any consequence in it!" and having concluded this remark, she readily took it along with her to her room, where she conned it over in company with Hsiang-yün; handing it also the next day to Pao-ch'ai to peruse. The burden of what Pao-ch'ai read was:
In what was no concern of mine, I should to thee have paid no heed,
For while I humour this, that one to please I don't succeed!
Act as thy wish may be! go, come whene'er thou list; 'tis naught to
me.
Sorrow or joy, without limit or bound, to indulge thou art free!
What is this hazy notion about relatives distant or close?
For what purpose have I for all these days racked my heart with woes?
Even at this time when I look back and think, my mind no pleasure
knows.
After having finished its perusal, she went on to glance at the Buddhistic stanza, and smiling: "This being," she soliloquised; "has awakened to a sense of perception; and all through my fault, for it's that ballad of mine yesterday which has incited this! But the subtle devices in all these rationalistic books have a most easy tendency to unsettle the natural disposition, and if to-morrow he does actually get up, and talk a lot of insane trash, won't his having fostered this idea owe its origin to that ballad of mine; and shan't I have become the prime of all guilty people?"
Saying this, she promptly tore the paper, and, delivering the pieces to the servant girls, she bade them go at once and burn them.
"You shouldn't have torn it!" Tai-yü remonstrated laughingly. "But wait and I'll ask him about it! so come along all of you, and I vouch I'll make him abandon that idiotic frame of mind and that depraved language."
The three of them crossed over, in point of fact, into Pao-yü's room, and Tai-yü was the first to smile and observe. "Pao-yü, may I ask you something? What is most valuable is a precious thing; and what is most firm is jade, but what value do you possess and what firmness is innate in you?"
But as Pao-yü could not, say anything by way of reply, two of them remarked sneeringly: "With all this doltish bluntness of his will he after all absorb himself in abstraction?" While Hsiang-yün also clapped her hands and laughed, "Cousin Pao has been discomfited."
"The latter part of that apothegm of yours," Tai-yü continued, "says:
"We would then find some place on which our feet to rest.
"Which is certainly good; but in my view, its excellence is not as yet complete! and I should still tag on two lines at its close;" as she proceeded to recite: