"If I do fancy anything," retorted Pao-yü smilingly, "I shall certainly send to you, aunt, for it."
"What would you like to eat," likewise inquired Madame Wang, "so that I may, on my return, send it round to you?"
"There's nothing that I care for," smiled Pao-yü, "though the soup made for me the other day, with young lotus leaves, and small lotus cores was, I thought, somewhat nice."
"From what I hear, its flavour is nothing very grand," lady Feng chimed in laughingly, from where she stood on one side. "It involves, however, a good deal of trouble to concoct; and here you deliberately go and fancy this very thing."
"Go and get it ready!" cried dowager lady Chia several successive times.
"Venerable ancestor," urged lady Feng with a smile, "don't you bother yourself about it! Let me try and remember who can have put the moulds away!" Then turning her head round, "Go and bid," she enjoined an old matron, "the chief in the cook-house go and apply for them!"
After a considerable lapse of time, the matron returned. "The chief in the cook-house," she explained, "says that the four sets of moulds for soups have all been handed up."
Upon hearing this, lady Feng thought again for a while. "Yes, I remember," she afterwards remarked, "they were handed up, but I can't recollect to whom they were given. Possibly they're in the tea-room."
Thereupon, she also despatched a servant to go and inquire of the keeper of the tea-room about them; but he too had not got them; and it was subsequently the butler, entrusted with the care of the gold and silver articles, who brought them round.
Mrs. Hsüeh was the first to take them and examine them. What, in fact, struck her gaze was a small box, the contents of which were four sets of silver moulds. Each of these was over a foot long, and one square inch (in breadth). On the top, holes were bored of the size of beans. Some resembled chrysanthemums, others plum blossom. Some were in the shape of lotus seed-cases, others like water chestnuts. They numbered in all thirty or forty kinds, and were ingeniously executed.