Lin Chih-hsiao's wife directed that two tables should be placed below the festive board, round which were seated Mrs. Hsüeh and 'sister-in-law' Li, and that one should be put at the foot of dowager lady Chia's couch.
"Place it in the middle!" old lady Chia exclaimed. "These women have never known what good manners mean. Put the table down." Saying this, she picked up the cash, and loosening the knots, she unstrung them and piled them on the table.
'The reunion in the western chamber' was just being sung. The play was drawing to a close. They had reached a part where Yü Shu runs off at night in high dudgeon, and Wen Pao jokingly cried out: "You go off with your monkey up; but, as luck would have it, this is the very day of the fifteenth of the first moon, and a family banquet is being given by the old lady in the Jung Kuo mansion, so wait and I'll jump on this horse and hurry in and ask for something to eat. I must look sharp!" The joke made old lady Chia, and the rest of the company laugh.
"What a dreadful, impish child!" Mrs. Hsüeh and the others exclaimed.
"Yet poor thing!"
"This child is only just nine years of age," lady Feng interposed.
"He has really made a clever hit!" dowager lady Chia laughed. "Tip him!" she shouted.
This shout over, three married women, who has previously got ready several small wicker baskets, came up, as soon as they heard the word 'tip', and, taking the heaps of loose cash piled on the table, they each filled a basket full, and, issuing outside, they approached the stage. "Dowager lady Chia, Mrs. Hsüeh, and the family relative, Mrs. Li, present Wen Pao this money to purchase something to eat with," they said.
At the end of these words, they flung the contents of the baskets upon the stage. So all then that fell on the ear was the rattle of the cash flying in every direction over the boards.
Chia Chen and Chia Lien had, by this time, enjoined the pages to fetch big baskets full of cash and have them in readiness. But as, reader, you do not know as yet in what way these presents were given, listen to the circumstances detailed in the subsequent chapter.