"Never mind, drop that!" Tai-yü rejoined, upon hearing his proposal. "I can't venture to write any more verses. Whenever I indite any, I'm mulcted. So I'd rather not be put to any great shame."
While uttering these words she screened her face with both hands.
"What's the matter?" Pao-yü smiled. "Why are you again making fun of me?
I'm not afraid of any shame, but, lo, you screen your face."
"The next time," Pao-ch'ai felt impelled to interpose laughingly, "I convene a meeting, we'll have four themes for odes and four for songs; and each one of us will have to write four odes and four roundelays. The theme of the first ode will treat of the plan of the great extreme; the rhyme fixed being 'hsien,' (first), and the metre consisting of five words in each line. We'll have to exhaust every one of the rhymes under 'hsien,' and mind, not a single one may be left out."
"From what you say," Pao-ch'in smilingly observed, "it's evident that you're not in earnest, cousin, in setting the club on foot. It's clear enough that your object is to embarrass people. But as far as the verses go, we could forcibly turn out a few, just by higgledy-piggledy taking several passages from the 'Canon of Changes,' and inserting them in our own; but, after all, what fun will there be in that sort of thing? When I was eight years of age, I went with my father to the western seaboard to purchase foreign goods. Who'd have thought it, we came across a girl from the 'Chen Chen' kingdom. She was in her eighteenth year, and her features were just like those of the beauties one sees represented in foreign pictures. She had also yellow hair, hanging down, and arranged in endless plaits. Her whole head was ornamented with one mass of cornelian beads, amber, cats' eyes, and 'grandmother-green-stone.' On her person, she wore a chain armour plaited with gold, and a coat, which was up to the very sleeves, embroidered in foreign style. In a belt, she carried a Japanese sword, also inlaid with gold and studded with precious gems. In very truth, even in pictures, there is no one as beautiful as she. Some people said that she was thoroughly conversant with Chinese literature, and could explain the 'Five classics,' that she was able to write odes and devise roundelays, and so my father requested an interpreter to ask her to write something. She thereupon wrote an original stanza, which all, with one voice, praised for its remarkable beauty, and extolled for its extraordinary merits."
"My dear cousin," eagerly smiled Pao-yü, "produce what she wrote, and let's have a look at it."
"It's put away in Nanking;" Pao-ch'in replied with a smile. "So how could I at present go and fetch it?"
Great was Pao-yü's disappointment at this rejoinder. "I've no luck," he cried, "to see anything like this in the world."
Tai-yü laughingly laid hold of Pao-ch'in. "Don't be humbugging us!" she remarked. "I know well enough that you are not likely, on a visit like this, to have left any such things of yours at home. You must have brought them along. Yet here you are now again palming off a fib on us by saying that you haven't got them with you. You people may believe what she says, but I, for my part, don't."
Pao-ch'in got red in the face. Drooping her head against her chest, she gave a faint smile; but she uttered not a word by way of response.