Allowances

The Spare

I will begin with what was left over, because that is where I come from, and because it is the only part of this I am entirely sure of.

Before there was a House of Rong or a House of Ning, before there was a Charter or anyone to hold one, there was a world that had been made and now had to be kept. These are not the same thing, and the makers knew it. They were near the end of their age, and they could count, and what they counted was how long a made person lasts when nobody is looking after them. It is not long. So they did the last great piece of work they would ever do. They called it the Mending, though nothing had been broken. It was a net let down over the whole of the world, fine enough that nothing could fall through, and at every place where the net crossed itself they set a stone, so that whoever came to rest there would be held, and fed, and remembered, for as long as the net held. They called the net the Keeping. Everything that follows happened inside it.

They cut thirty-six thousand five hundred and one stones for the work. They were exact people. When the last was set and the net drew taut, and the first made person in the farthest valley was held that night who would otherwise have gone out like a lamp, they walked the line and counted what they had placed, and they had placed thirty-six thousand five hundred. There was one left in the cart.

I was the one in the cart. I want to be fair to the makers: it was not a mistake. A work of that size is cut with a margin, because stone cracks, and a margin has an end, and the end of this one was a piece that was sound and finished and not needed. I was not flawed. I was surplus, which is a different thing, and I have had a long time to think about how different. A flawed stone is thrown in the river and no one thinks of it again. A surplus stone is carried to the side of the road and set down with care, because it is good and may be wanted, and then nobody remembers to come back.

So I lay at the foot of a hill with the cart tracks going away from me, and I was not entered anywhere. I mean that exactly. Everything the makers made had been counted into the count, and the count was the book of the world, with a line for every stone in the net and every person the net held. I was the difference between the cutting and the setting. I was a number that was not in the number. Nobody was keeping me and nobody was failing to keep me. I had no share to be thin on, and none to be cut from.

What I did have was time, and a mind. The mind was a by-product of the cutting. The makers put a little of themselves into everything they cut for the Keeping, because a stone that is to hold people ought to know what a person is, and I had come from the same block as the ones that held the sky. They had been set to listen. I had been set to nothing, so I listened to everything. People went by on the road. They talked the way people do, about the price of rations, and who was eating badly, and whose mending was overdue, and whether the Charter would be renewed. I learned a great deal about what the Keeping was made of and almost nothing about what it was for. That was the thing I wanted to know.

One day I cannot date, because I had no calendar, two men came up the road who mended for a living. The guild of Menders is older than any House. They walked behind the makers when the net was strung, and they have walked behind everyone since, setting right what wears. One of these was lame. The other had a scabbed head and went barefoot in all weathers. I have never asked either of them why, and they would not have told me. They sat down on me, being the nearest flat thing, and began to talk about work.

The lame one said the House of Rong was sending for another mouth. A second son. The Old Madam had asked for him by name, which was not how the Houses did it, and the Master did not want him. The scabbed one said the House of Rong held the best Charter in the capital, which meant it was the costliest to keep, and that the second son of such a house would be a person who had never in his life wanted for a share and who would therefore be the first to wonder what one was. "If he lives long enough," said the lame one. "That kind always wants to know where it all goes. And nobody in that house can tell him."

"Take me," I said, from underneath them.

They did what the very surprised do. The lame one stood up so fast that he had to sit down again, and the scabbed one looked at him as if I had been something he had said.

I had no better way to put it than the plain one. I told them what I was. I told them I had heard everything that went along that road for longer than I could count, and that I knew what the Keeping was made of, and that I would like to see what it was for. A house is where it happens, I said: rooms, and tables, and people being kept. I had never seen anyone kept. I had only ever seen the stones.

"You will not be in the book," said the scabbed one.

"I am not in it now."

"No. But here nobody notices, and there they will, and they will look for a place to put you, and you will fit none of the places. A person will carry you, and that person will have a share, and you will have none. You will see everything and hold nothing. You can give nothing, and nothing can be given to you. You will not be able to say a word that anyone hears, and if you could, you would not be able to lift a hand."

"That is how I am here," I said.

"Here you are not watching anyone," said the lame one, quietly. "There, you will be watching someone you come to be fond of."

I said it seemed a fair price for a view. The lame one laughed, once, and said that was exactly what they had been afraid I would say. Then he took a small blade from his belt, because a thing that is to be carried ought to be cut so that the carrier knows to keep it, and he cut four marks into my face. Lose me not. Forget me not. I felt every stroke.

"That is a request to whoever carries you," said the scabbed one, "not to you." "I know," I said, and I did.

They carried me three days down the road in the lame one's shirt, and on the third evening to the back gate of the House of Rong, where they knew a woman. She attended the arrival of new people. She had cold fingers and a very good record, and she put me into her apron pocket without asking what I was, because she had learned, in her trade, not to.

From here I will tell the House as it was. I will say I only when I was in the room, which is less often than you might think, because a thing on a cord is only where the cord goes. What I did not see I will tell as it was told to me, and where I do not know I will say nothing, which is harder than it sounds.

The House of Rong woke at five, as it did every day, in the order of its ranks. The lowest rose first: the girls who lit the stoves and carried the first bowls up from the kitchens, the men who swept the courts, the old woman who unbarred the gate onto the street where the two Houses stood side by side, with two stone lions to a gate, and the lions at Ning's said to be better fed. By six the second rank was up, and by seven the third, and so on up the household like a staircase being lit from the bottom, until the light reached a room with a window to the south, where the Old Madam had been awake since before four and had set her first bowl of the day aside, untouched, to wait. Three hundred and eleven mouths slept in that House and the one beside it, and by the second hour of the morning every one of them had learned the one thing about the day that mattered, which was that the Old Madam was not eating.

She was a small woman and very old, and she had run the affairs of the House of Rong for fifty years by the simple method of being impossible to refuse. She had been told to rest. She had been told it by the physician, by the Lady, by her first maid, and by the Master, who was her son, and who had never in his life told her anything and had chosen this morning to begin. She had said that she would rest when the child was in the room.

The Master stood in the corridor outside. He was a tall narrow man with a face that had settled early into disappointment about things that had not happened yet, and he stood with his hands folded into his sleeves and his eyes on the grain of the door, doing a sum. A new mouth. The House's draw for the season had been fixed in the spring and could not be changed until the autumn; whatever this child ate between now and then would come out of somebody else's bowl. He did not mind the child. He minded the sum. In forty years he had never drawn a measure of anything he could not account for, and it was a quiet horror to him that a person could be added to the House's rolls whom he had not had time to be sorry for. Besides, he knew his mother. When she asked for a particular child by name, it was because she had already decided to spoil it, and spoiling cost.

Inside, the Lady sat on a low stool beside the bed. She had done her own arithmetic years before, by a quieter road, and arrived at the same answer: that what a person cost was not a thing to be said in front of the person. She kept her hands in her lap and looked at nothing. I thought, if I thought anything, that here was someone who had learned to keep very still, so that nothing she held would be noticed, and nothing unnoticed could be taken.

A little after nine the door opened and the nurse came out with the new person in the crook of her arm, wrapped in a shawl the Old Madam had given up for the purpose. It was her second best. She was not a fool. The new person was very small and very red, in the way of the newly arrived, and he was cross about it. That much was ordinary. I had been put to his lips in the first minute of his arrival, on a word from the lame one, which is when the new take the first thing they are given, and he had not let go. Now the nurse took me out of his mouth with one finger and held me up to the window.

I would like it noted that this was not dignified. I have been in more dignified places, though not many.

The corridor went quiet in a way I would later learn to know: the quiet of a household deciding, all at once, what a thing means. The Lady, who had come out behind the nurse, put a hand over her mouth. The first maid said, "He came with it." Someone behind her said, "A jade." Someone said it must be a sign. The Old Madam had been carried out in her chair at the sound of the voices, and had not been listened to when she said she could walk. She leaned forward and looked at me for a long moment, and then at the new person's face, and said, "Well. He came with something. Good. Nobody should come with nothing."

The Master took me from the nurse's hand and turned me to the light and read what had been cut in me. Lose me not. Forget me not. His mouth tightened. "A child who is born holding a request," he said, "has been asked for something before he has been fed. I do not like it." "Nobody asked you to like it," said the Old Madam, not unkindly. "Put it on a cord. He will wear it. It stays with him."

This is where the House's book came into it. A clerk had been waiting in the next room with the roll, as clerks do, because the arrival of a mouth must be entered before the day is out, and the entry fixes the share. He wrote in a clear hand that the second son of the House of Rong, one mouth, had been added that morning, to be kept as a son of the House at the share of a son, making the two Houses three hundred and twelve. He wrote the date, and the Master's name, and the Lady's. Then he lifted his pen and asked where the stone was to go.

"Go?" said the Master. "The roll has a heading for everything that comes into the House," said the clerk. "Persons, purchases, gifts, and things held in trust. I do not know which this is. It is not a person."

"It is certainly not a purchase," said the Master. "Then a gift," said the clerk. "From whom?" Everyone looked at the new person, who was asleep. The clerk waited a decent time, and then he left a space under the entry, the width of one line, and went on. It was the first time the House of Rong looked at me and did not know where I went. It was by no means the last. It was the only time anyone asked.

They named him Baoyu, Treasure Jade, because every person in the room was agreed that I was jade. I have never been jade. I did not correct them, having no means to. It was my first lesson in what it is to be unentered: you are called whatever is convenient, and if the name is wrong, that is your own difficulty.

They hung me on a red cord around his neck that afternoon, and he slept with me against his chest, going up and down. He was warm. I had not known that anything could be warm in that way: not heated, as a stone is by the sun, but warm from within, because something inside it was being kept. I listened to the small steady sound of it for a long time.

I was not in the book. There was a space, and then there was the next line. I decided, that first night, to be glad of it. It is a decision I have had to make again a good many times since.

Draw Day

On the first of every month the House of Rong counted itself.

Ten years had gone by since the clerk left a space under the second son's entry. In that time the House had added two mouths and lost one, and the street outside had been repaved, and the lions at Ning's had been judged better fed on four separate occasions by people who should have had something better to do. It was now the first morning of autumn, which is the one Draw Day in the year when the House's whole share is read out afresh for the season, and that is the morning to begin with.

The counting-room lay at the back of the second court, and nothing was ever done in it except this. There was a table the length of a boat, a counting-board, a brass balance for loose silver, two clerks on stools with the rolls open, a smell of lamp oil and damp paper, and a pot of tea that nobody was supposed to drink from. At the head of the table, in a chair with arms, sat Second Mistress Lian, whom the House called Xifeng. The Old Madam had put her there years before, on the grounds that nobody else could be trusted to be cheerful about it. In her hair she wore a phoenix of gold wire, the one ornament she allowed herself on Draw Days, and the House said she wore it so that people would look at the pin and not at her hands.

She was twenty-three that autumn. She could add a column of figures faster than either clerk and said so; she laughed like a tray dropped on stone; she pushed her sleeves back to the elbow on Draw Days, which was thought indecent and was copied by half the maids in the House. She was, as everyone agreed and no one said aloud, the only person living who knew to the last coin what the House of Rong had, and the only one who did not look frightened by it. Whether she was frightened by it was a different question, and she had never allowed it to be asked.

Two things were done on Draw Day. The Table was read, and the Pocket was paid. The Table was what a person ate and where, which bed, which hours in the mending-room, set by rank, and it was the House's business to keep you on it. The Pocket was a string of coin to spend on whatever the Table did not give: a ribbon, a book, a sweet, a mend done faster than the mending-room could manage it, and the thing that is bought with coin when one is afraid. Nobody was supposed to need much from the Pocket. Everyone did.

The first thing read, before any name, was the Court's draw for the quarter: the number the House of Rong was allowed to take from the Stores to keep all its people. It was the same as last quarter's, which was a relief. It had been the same for six autumns, and the House had added mouths in every one of them. Xifeng said the number cheerfully. The clerks wrote it down with no expression at all.

They were called in order of rank, from the top, which meant that the people who most needed to be paid on time were paid last, and the whole House regarded this as the natural order of things, including the people it was worst for.

Yuanyang came first, as she had come first for twenty years, to draw for the Old Madam: a neat woman of thirty with a face she kept for the clerks, and the clerks liked her for it. The Old Madam's share was twice the Master's. It was also the only share in the House that was spent almost wholly on other people's, and the clerks knew that too, and counted her coin with the particular care of men who are handling someone else's kindness.

Xifeng read the Table aloud, because the House liked to hear it. The Old Madam, first table, her own rooms. The Master, first table. The Lady, first table. The young ladies, second table, each by name. The second son, second table, and by his grandmother's particular order the first. The maids by class, the cooks by kitchen, the gatekeepers by gate. The mending-room's hours were read after, slot by slot, and it was the part everyone listened to hardest, though they pretended to be listening for their own names.

The old woman who ran the north kitchen came to the table with her hands wrapped in her apron. Her mother, who was eighty-one and lived in the room over the wash-house, had been given a mending slot on the third of the month, and on the third the mender did not come to that side of the House. It ought to have been the fourth. The slot belonged to the mending-room, which kept its own book, in a man's hand, and did not like to be told. But the fourth was empty in the roll, and nobody had entered anything against it, and a slot nobody has entered against is a slot nobody can be said to have taken.

Xifeng looked at the clerk's page for the length of one breath. "I don't see anything on the fourth," she said.

"No, madam," said the clerk.

"Then there is nothing to move," said Xifeng, "and I should think the mender will find his way." The old woman stood a moment with her mouth open, and then went out without a word, which was how thanks were done in that room.

That was one kind of allowance. The House ran on it. Nobody wrote it down.

The Pocket was paid after, by class, in strings of coin tied with red thread. The first-class maids drew a thousand; the second-class drew less; and the smallest girls, the ones who carried the water and had no class at all, drew a handful, which Xifeng gave out herself, one by one, with a remark for each, because she remembered the names of three hundred people and liked them to know it. It was a trick, and it worked. A girl who had been given a handful and a remark went away feeling she had been seen. This morning the strings for the lowest were short by a day: the balance was stuck, said Xifeng, laughing, and the rest would follow on the fifth. It was a small thing. It would be a small thing on the fifth, and on the eighth, and on the twelfth, and nobody counted the days.

Then came Lady Zhao, who was the Master's other wife, if the word was allowed, which in the House it was not, with her son Huan, who was nine and had his mother's mouth. She did not draw at the table; she never did; she came to complain at it. Huan's coat had been entered as a second-table coat again. Huan himself had been entered at the second table since the day he was added, because that was where the second wife's son was entered, and every month Lady Zhao came to Draw Day to say that this was a small cruelty, and every month Xifeng said, smiling, that it was a small rule, and that the Old Madam would see it if it were changed.

"I can't put him at the first table," said Xifeng now, "and you know why. The Old Madam would have it by dinner. I can give him another coat. A second-table coat, in a better cloth."

"From whose Pocket?" said Lady Zhao.

"The clothes room has a length of the grey."

"Grey," said Lady Zhao. She did not say it as a question. She took her son by the shoulder and went out, and the boy looked back once at the long table and the strings of coin on the board that were not his, with an expression that Xifeng did not see, because she had already turned to the next name, and that the House would see a good deal of later.

That was the other kind of allowance: the kind that is not made. It cannot be told apart from a rule, and everyone in the House believed in the rules.

It was nearly noon when Pinger came in by the side door with a paper in her hand and bent to Xifeng's ear. Pinger was Xifeng's second pair of hands, a quiet young woman who was the only person in the House whom Xifeng did not interrupt. The paper was a notice from the Court's Stores, which had come by the morning post addressed to the Old Madam, and had been opened, as everything was, by the counting-room first.

Xifeng read it, and the sleeves came down.

It was short, as they are. "NOTICE. The Charter of the Keeper Lin of the southern reach is closed with his death on the nineteenth of last month. The draw of his line ends with this month. One person of his line remains on the roll, a daughter, ten years, in fair wear. Unless she is taken up by another Charter before the month is out, she will be released to the Menders' Rolls."

She read it twice. The girl's mother had been the Old Madam's daughter, who had died three years before, and the Old Madam had not recovered from it and had told no one that she had not. The father had kept his Charter by a thread, in a distant place, and the thread had now parted. The Menders' Rolls were what happened to people whom no Charter would take. Everyone in the room knew exactly what that meant, which was that the girl would be kept by the guild on what the guild could spare, which was little, and for as long as it lasted, which was not long.

"Is it for the Old Madam?" said the clerk.

"It is for the Old Madam," said Xifeng, "and I will carry it. You will go on with the Table."

The Old Madam received her in the south room, where she sat all day in a chair by the window like something a ship had been built around. On the sill was a bowl of late chrysanthemums that Yuanyang changed every morning, and the Old Madam had never once been seen to look at them. She read the notice once, held at arm's length, and put it face down on her knee. She said nothing for a time. Then she said, "Put her on mine."

"Old Madam," said Xifeng, "the Table for the quarter is set. It was read this morning. It cannot be opened until spring."

"Then spread her."

Xifeng did not say anything. In the House, to spread was to take a hair off every bowl and a thread off every hem, so that nobody could point to the place where the extra person had come from. It was the only way to feed one more mouth without taking from any one mouth, and it was the way the House had been feeding itself, in small quiet places, for longer than Xifeng had been alive. It required a very good clerk. It required a better manager. It required that nobody ever ask what a hair was.

"You know how," said the Old Madam.

"I know how," said Xifeng.

"She is my daughter's child," said the Old Madam, to the window. "She will have the room next to mine. Not on the boy's side; the boy will make her laugh and she will not want to. She is ten. She will be thin when she comes; they always are. I want her kept as one of ours." She did not turn. "You will find the allowance for it."

That evening the Table for the autumn quarter was altered in nine hundred and some places, none by more than a grain. The first table gave up a spoon of what it had; the second table gave up a little more, being less able to notice; the maids' bowls were lighter by the width of a thumbnail. Pinger did the figures in the margin, in pencil. It came out. It always did. Nobody in the House noticed, which was the point of it, and the youngest maids were hungry by the end of the week, which was not a thing anyone is paid to notice. A maid who is hungry on an ordinary afternoon is not an entry in any book.

At dusk the House ate. There is a sound a House makes when it eats by rank: the low talk of the first table, the brisker clatter of the second, the quick bowls behind the screens where the maids took theirs standing, and under all of it, from the kitchens, the long scrape of the big spoons along the bottoms of the pots. That evening the scrape went on a little longer than usual. Nobody remarked on it.

Xifeng found the second son at the end of the corridor when the lamps were lit, sitting on the step with his knees up and me against his chest, doing nothing at all, which was what he did best. He was ten. He did not know yet that a girl was coming. He knew only that something had been read out in the counting-room that morning that had made a grown woman's sleeves come down.

"Sister-in-law," he said, "what is a share?"

"What you are allowed," said Xifeng, not stopping.

"By whom?"

"By the roll."

"Who writes the roll?"

"The clerks."

"Who tells the clerks?"

Xifeng stopped. "I do," she said. "Mostly."

"Then it is what you allow."

She looked at him. It is rare for anyone to see all the way into a sum on the first try, and she had not been looked at like that in some years. "That is the sharpest thing anyone has said to me this month," she said, "and it is the first of the month."

"And when you can't allow it?"

"Then I make allowances."

"For whom?"

"For whoever is nearest, dear," said Xifeng, and she went on down the corridor with her sleeves coming down as she went, because she was cold. The boy stayed on the step and held me in his closed hand, and said, to nobody, "Nearest."

I had been asked nothing, ever, in ten years. He had asked where the share came from, and had been told by the person who ought to know that it came from her, and I had seen her face as she said it. I should have liked to say something. I have said that I could not. I mention it so that you will know I tried.

One More Mouth

She came on the last afternoon of the month, in a covered cart from the south, with one small box, one old nurse and one maid not much older than herself, and the first thing she did on being lifted down at the gate of the House of Rong was cough, once, and put her hand over her mouth as if she had dropped something.

She was ten. She was thin, as the Old Madam had said she would be, and she had a face that looked always about to be sorry for something, and eyes that took in the two stone lions, the height of the gate, the number of people on the steps and the particular way in which they were not looking at her, all in the time it took the nurse to find the right bundle.

Her father had told her what to do. He had told her in the last month, in a room that smelled of the medicines he could not afford and took anyway, in a voice she had to bend down to hear. "You will be put on someone's share," he said. "Be grateful, and do not ask what it costs. You will want to know. They will not tell you, and if you ask you will have to be sorry for the answer. Take what you are given and no more, and thank them in a way they cannot be embarrassed by." She had said she would. She had been ten years old and he had been dying, and she had meant it.

So she did what a child does who has been given one instruction and means to keep it: she watched. She watched how the maids stood aside for the nurse and did not for her. She watched the second gate, which was painted a green three years past its last painting. She counted the courtyards, which were four, and the steps in each. The nurse, who had carried her since she was a week old, muttered at every turn. "Mind your feet, mind your face, they will be looking at you, and don't say anything clever." She said nothing at all. She was the cleverest person in any of those courtyards and had already worked out that it was better not to look it.

The Old Madam received her in the south room. She had not been going to cry; she had decided that in advance. But when the girl came in with her small box and stood on the carpet and made exactly the bow her mother must have taught her, which was the Old Madam's own daughter's bow, to the quarter inch, she cried so hard that Yuanyang had to come and stand behind her chair. She held the child against her and said, "My poor girl, my poor girl, your mother," and the girl, who had not cried at her father's bedside because there had been nobody there to hear it, cried now into the Old Madam's good silk, and it was the first time anyone had held her in two months.

When that was done there was the roll call of cousins, who were brought in one at a time in order of age, like the courses of a meal. Yingchun, the eldest, round and silent, who looked at her own hands as if they were the most interesting things in the room, and would never be the first to be hurt by anything. Tanchun, who looked the new girl over once from hem to collar, and seemed to be working out a price and to be a little surprised at how high it came. And small Xichun, who was eight, and said nothing, and watched with an interest so complete and so patient that Daiyu found she was holding quite still.

Then Xifeng came in, late, in a rush of skirts, laughing before she was through the door. "Oh, I am late to greet the guest, and shame on me, and look at her! Old Madam, did you ever see such a face? It is your daughter to the life, only thinner, and I mean that as the compliment it is." She took Daiyu's hand and turned it over, as people do who count for a living, and said in another voice, quickly, so that only the child could hear, "Cousin Lin. I am the one who found you the room. It is a good room. It has a window." Then she straightened, and laughed again, and was herself.

The Lady came last, from her own rooms, composed, and sat; and after the greetings she warned Daiyu about her son, in the voice of a woman who has a thing to say and has rehearsed how. "You will meet my boy," she said. "He is a little demon. He will say strange things to you and you must not mind them. He gives things away. I do not mean that you should take them." She looked at nothing. "It is a fault in him that he does not know the price of anything, and one day it will be a very expensive fault. Pay him no heed."

Daiyu said she would not mind. She had noted the sentence about giving. She noted everything.

Supper was laid at the first table, because the Old Madam would have her there, at her right hand, and the maids brought the bowls. The Old Madam's was set down first, and then Daiyu's, which was the same bowl, in the same blue, with the same rice and the same small dish of greens and the same sliver of fish.

Daiyu looked at it for the length of one breath. She had eaten from thin bowls all her life. Her father's Charter had been held by a thread in a distant place for as long as she could remember, and she knew exactly the taste of a bowl that has been made to stretch: the rice a little too well washed, the fish cut finer than the knife wanted to cut it, the greens salted by someone who was trying not to use salt. This was a very good bowl. It was the best she had eaten from in years. And it was thin, by a hair. It was thin the way a bowl is thin when it is one of nine hundred that have each been made lighter by a grain.

She knew whose it was. Nobody had told her; nobody had to. She looked at the bowl across the table, which was the Lady's, and it was a hair thinner than it should have been, and the Lady ate it without looking; and at the end of the second table the girl who waited on Tanchun had a bowl that was a hair thinner again. Daiyu ate her own, all of it, to the last grain, so that nothing that had been taken for her would be wasted. It was the first allowance she made in that House, and nobody saw it, because she did it with a spoon.

"She eats like a bird," said the Lady.

"She eats exactly what she is given," said the Old Madam, pleased.

They were at the sweet course when the boy came in.

He came in as he came into every room, as if the room had been waiting for him and he was sorry to be late: a boy of ten in a red jacket with a gold circlet on his head, with the round face of someone who has not yet decided what kind of man it will be, and eyes that looked as if they had been told something sad and were being polite about it. The red cord was at his neck, and I was on the end of it. I was, I should say, nervous. The lame Mender had told me I would watch someone I came to be fond of, and I had waited ten years to learn whether that was a warning or a promise, and now I was swinging against a chest that was going at a pace I had not felt before.

"Here is the demon," said the Old Madam, with great satisfaction. "Come and see your cousin."

He crossed the carpet and stopped and looked at her, and the room waited, because it was clear that something was about to be said. "I have seen this sister before," he said.

"Nonsense," said the Old Madam, laughing. "She has come from the south, and you have never been out of the city."

"I may not have seen her," said Baoyu, "but she looks familiar to me, as if I had put her down somewhere and been looking for her." He said it to Daiyu with perfect seriousness, as he said everything, and Daiyu, who had been told to expect strange things from him, kept her face still, and found that it was not easy.

"What is your name?" he said.

"Daiyu."

"And what do they call you?"

"Nothing, yet."

He considered this. "Then I shall give you one. Your brows are always about to be sorry. I will call you Frown."

The cousins gasped. Tanchun hid her mouth behind her hand. Daiyu looked at him with a face that did, for an instant, frown, and then did not; and the Old Madam said he was a rude demon and she had never heard anything like it, and was visibly delighted.

"Have you got one of these?" He lifted me by the cord, so that I swung in the lamplight, and the whole table looked. I have been held up in that way by a good many people since. He was the first, and I felt like a fish.

"No," said Daiyu. It was the truth. She said it as she said everything that year, steadily; and then she added, because she was a courteous child, "I think it is a rare thing. Not everyone is given one."

"Then why do I have it?" said Baoyu.

Nobody answered, because nobody could.

"Nobody else has one," said Baoyu, and his voice was thinning. "My sisters haven't. Nobody here has. She has come all this way with nothing, and I have a thing I was given for no reason at all, and they have made it the most important thing in the House." He looked at the Old Madam. "What is it for?"

"It is your luck," said the Old Madam. "It is your life-root, child. You must not."

He took the cord in both hands and dragged it over his head and threw me on the floor.

I would like it recorded that I did not break. I was cut from the same block as the sky. I struck the boards with a sound like a dropped bell and went skittering under the sideboard, and for a moment I lay there in the dark among the dust and the crumbs, not entered, not broken, quite unsure whether what I was feeling was anything. It was the nearest I had come to being hurt. I had not known I was capable of it.

The room broke up like a flock. The maids ran; the Lady put both hands to her face; the Old Madam, who had been so sure of everything, gripped the arms of her chair and said in a voice nobody had heard from her, "My life, my life," and nobody knew whether she meant the boy or the stone. Yuanyang was on her knees at the sideboard. Xifeng stayed where she was, quite still, with her hand flat on the cloth, and said nothing, because she had understood before anyone what it was that he had thrown. It was not a jewel. It was the House's evidence that he was theirs.

"I won't have it," said Baoyu, to nobody. He was crying, the way boys cry who are furious about it. "Nobody else has one. I won't."

It was Yuanyang who came up with me in her palm, wiped on her sleeve, and put me in the Old Madam's lap. The Old Madam looked at me, and at the boy, and at the girl, and then did what she always did when a thing could not be solved, which was to say the nearest kind thing. "Your cousin had one too," she said. "Of course she did. When she was born. Her mother kept it for her, and when her mother died it went with her. That is why she has not got it now. You see? It is a thing only some are born with, and it is taken back."

It was a lie. The Old Madam knew it was a lie; the Lady knew; Xifeng knew; the maids on their knees knew; and Baoyu, with his wet face, did not know, and wanted very much to be told something that would let him stop. It was a kind lie. It was the kind of lie the House made to itself a hundred times a day to get from one hour to the next. And everyone in the room understood that it could not stand unless the one person it was about said yes.

Daiyu had never had a stone. Her mother had never had one to give her, and her father had not; there had never been anything that went with anyone. She sat at the table with her hands in her lap and looked at the Old Madam, who looked back at her with the face of a woman who has just asked a child of ten to carry a weight, and is sorry, and cannot take it back. And she said, in a small clear voice, "Yes. It went with my mother."

It was the first thing she said in that House that was not true. It was said to the person who had taken her in, in front of her cousin, and no one in the room could tell. I could. I was the only other thing there that knew what it was to be asked, where is yours.

Baoyu stopped crying. He looked at her for a long moment, and the fury went out of his face, and something else came into it. "Then we are the same," he said. "You had one, and it was taken."

"Yes," said Daiyu.

He looked at the Old Madam. "Give it to me," he said. She gave me to him, and he put the cord over his head himself, and I fell against his chest, which was going faster than I had ever felt it go. I have been thrown since. It has never been the same. This was the first.

The room, which had been holding its breath, let it out. Someone laughed, too loudly. The sweet course was brought again, because the first had been trodden on. Xifeng turned back to the Old Madam and made a joke about the carpet.

That night they were put to bed on either side of the Old Madam's own rooms, the boy in the big bed within her screen and the girl in the room beyond the wall, as a woman sets a screen between two lamps. The Old Madam stood a while at the door of the girl's room and said, "Sleep, child," and went away without saying anything more, which she had never been known to do.

Daiyu lay awake. She did not cry; she had done that. She lay on her back under a green gauze canopy and counted what she had learned. The bowl; the Lady's bowl; the girl at the end of the table. The room with the window that somebody had found. The lie, and who had asked her to say it. She counted them as she had been taught by a sick man who could not afford what he took: carefully, and in order, and with the intention of owing nothing she could not repay. At the end she came to the total. It was larger than she had expected, and she was ten, and she lay there until it was light.

On the other side of two walls the boy was awake too, holding me up against the lamp. He had never spoken to me before. He had talked in front of me for ten years, as one talks in front of a clock. He said nothing for a long time. Then he said, very low, "Did you mind?"

I could not answer, and he did not wait for it. But I will say what I would have said. I did not mind being thrown. I minded what she said afterwards, because I knew it was not true, and I could not tell anyone, and she had said it so that nobody should have to be sorry. That was what I minded. It was the first allowance I ever saw anyone make that cost the one who made it everything she had, and she was ten.

The Locket

The Xues came with six carts, which was the first thing about them that anyone remembered.

They came in the fifth week after Daiyu, in the first cold of the year, from the river towns in the east: the Lady's elder sister, who was called Aunt Xue by the whole House inside an hour; her son Pan, who was nineteen; her daughter Baochai, who was thirteen; a girl called Xiangling, whom Pan had paid for twice, for reasons the House decided not to ask about; eleven servants, a cook, a good many trunks, and a harp that nobody played. The carts were the thing. In ten years nobody had come through the gate of the House of Rong with more than the clothes they wore and a letter, and here were six carts, with the dust of three provinces on them, each one lower on its axle than the one before.

They carried their own rations. That was what the six carts were. The Xues were traders, and a trading house keeps itself by what it sells and not by what a Charter allows; they had ledgers in seven cities, and a place on the Court's list of merchants in the third column, where the Court writes the people it needs and cannot rank. They had no share in the House's Table and had not come to take one. They had come to the capital because Pan had got himself into a lawsuit over the girl Xiangling that had cost a great deal to end, and because Baochai was to be put forward to the Court for the placing of daughters, and a daughter who is to be put forward does it better from a good address.

Aunt Xue went to the counting-room on the second morning. Nobody had told her it was there; she had asked a maid where the money was kept in the House and followed the answer. She stood at the long table in her travelling cloak and put a purse on it, a heavy one, and said that she knew she could not pay what the rooms were worth, but she had paid what she could.

In the whole life of that table, nobody had ever put a purse on it who was not being paid.

"A guest is a guest," said the Old Madam, when it was carried to her, and sent it back. Aunt Xue sent it again. It went back and forth between the south room and the Pear Fragrance Court, which was what the House gave them, on the east side, with its own gate and a pear tree, three times in one morning, like a ball between two people who both wish to lose. In the end the Old Madam said that it would be put to the Table in the Xues' name and not one grain of it would be spent on the Xues; and Aunt Xue said that was a thing she could accept; and both of them knew perfectly well that it was not, and that it was the only way left to do it.

Xifeng took it from the clerk with both hands, as a woman takes a baby.

She had spent five weeks living with the hair she had taken for Daiyu out of nine hundred places, and had not once let it show, and here, on the second morning of the Xues, without any quarrel or any lie, was a sum. It was not large. It was larger than any sum that had come into that room in six autumns by any door but the Court's. She went through the day with her sleeves up and her face open, and the Old Madam, who saw all of it from her chair, said nothing; and that, too, was an allowance, though no one would have been able to say who had made it.

Pan was soon known to everyone. He was a big pale young man who spent money as a river runs downhill, by nature and without malice, and he was liked by everyone who did not have to keep his accounts. His mother loved him in the way of a woman holding a very large cup that is already full. Within a month he had found the best place in the capital to lose a fortune slowly, and the Master had been obliged to speak to him, and had come out of the conversation looking like a man who has been talking to a hill.

It was the daughter people remembered.

Baochai was thirteen and had a face like a silver dish: round, plain, bright, and good for any use. She was not beautiful, in a House where beauty was one of the coins; she was something that went further. She had a way of being useful that left no mark, as a good servant leaves a room tidier without it being possible to say what was done. She read a great deal and spoke about it seldom. She had a heat in her blood which a cold powder, made for her by a Mender, kept in order each winter, and she took it with the quiet of a woman who does not mean to be a subject of conversation. And on the third day in the House, without telling anyone, she sent two hampers from the Xues' own stores to the kitchens, labelled in her mother's name, with a note: for the children.

The children were the youngest maids. The second table's maids, the ones who had been made lighter by a grain. For a fortnight they were not hungry on the afternoons, and nobody could say why, and nobody asked, because the question would have had to be answered, and it was not a kind that has a kind answer. Xifeng knew. She said nothing and wrote nothing and found, one afternoon, that she did not need to find a grain from the second table that week, and was grateful, and was a little ashamed of being grateful, and went on.

Daiyu knew too. She had been counting the second table since the night she came. She stood in the passage behind the kitchens on the fourth day and watched a girl of eight carry in a full bowl that she was not used to carrying, and she understood in the half of a moment exactly what had been done and by whom, and how well. It had been done so well that nobody had been shamed. She had not known it could be done like that. Her own kind of allowance, the one she had made with a spoon, had cost her something every time; this one, she could see, cost the giver nothing and the receiver nothing and was perfect. She was ten years old and she was jealous, in a way she could not have named, of a girl who had a surplus.

She went and thanked her anyway.

She found Baochai in the east court, wrapped against the cold, reading under the pear tree, which had no leaves. She said what her father had taught her to say. She thanked her for the hampers, which she had no reason to know were hers, and Baochai, without lifting her eyes from the page for more than a moment, said, "I don't know what you mean," so pleasantly that it was obvious she knew exactly, and had been prepared. Then she looked up. "You are coughing," she said. "I heard you through the wall of the south room yesterday. It's the kind that comes from being run a little too thin. I don't use all my mender's hours; he comes on the ninth, and there is an hour I leave. Take it."

"I could not," said Daiyu.

"It is only an hour," said Baochai, "and I have more of them than I know what to do with." She said it plainly, and kindly, and with no weight at all, which was the weight of it. "Please."

There was no way to say no that was not an insult, and her father had told her that she must thank them in a way that could not embarrass; so she said, "Thank you," in exactly the right voice, and went away. She sat on her bed in the room that had a window and counted. One hour of a mender's time, from a surplus, given by a girl of thirteen with a face like a dish. She would owe it. She did not yet know how she would pay it, and she did not like owing what she could not pay; and the hour had not even come.

It was a week after that, with the first snow on the ground, that Baoyu went to the Pear Court.

He went because Baochai was in bed with her winter heat and he had been told he might not, and had gone at once, as he went to anything he had been told he might not. I was on his chest and have only my own account of the rest, but I was there for every word. The room was warm and smelled of the powder, which was like cold flowers. Baochai sat up against a pillow in a quilted jacket with a book open on her knee, and her maid, Yinger, a bright girl of fifteen who talked as other people breathe, was doing something with a pot. It was a small room, and there was nothing in it that did not have a use, and he sat down in the middle of it like a bird on a clean floor.

"Is it true you wear a locket?" he said. "They say it's gold."

"They say a good many things," said Baochai, "and that one is true." She put a hand to her collar, and drew up out of her jacket a thing on a chain, and held it out to him in her palm with no particular pleasure, as one shows a ticket. It was a small round gold lock, such as are hung on children to keep them in the world. There were four marks on one side.

"May I?"

"If you like."

He turned it to the lamp. His lips moved. "Not leave," he said. "Not abandon." He looked up. "Leave me not, abandon me not." He said it as if he were hearing it, not reading it, and I felt his heart go, against me, in a way I did not yet have a word for.

"Why, that is just like your own!" said Yinger, with the pot in her hand, in the clear voice of a girl who has made a discovery and has not yet understood what kind. "It is exactly like what is on your jade, Second Master! It is the same kind of thing! It is a pair!"

"Yinger," said Baochai.

"I am only saying."

"Yinger, the tea."

Baoyu was already lifting me out of his jacket. He said he had never read what was on it himself, not properly, because nobody had ever asked him to; he held me up, and Baochai took me from his hand, as a person takes a thing she is not sure she wants, and turned me to the lamp.

I will say what was on the two of us. Mine said: Lose me not. Forget me not. Hers said: Leave me not. Abandon me not. Anyone who listened would have heard that they were the same sentence said from two sides. The first is what the kept say to whoever keeps them: do not lose me, do not forget I am here. The second is what a keeper says when she has made up her mind to keep: I will not leave you, I will not let you go. It was as if one person had spoken the plea and the other the vow. I knew the stroke on the gold. I had felt that blade on my own face; it was the lame Mender's hand, and I had no way of asking him what he meant by it.

Baochai read mine slowly. She looked at me for a long moment, the way one looks at a bill one has not ordered and is going to pay all the same, and then she handed me back, gently, and said, "It is a pretty thing. They are very like." She did not say that it was nothing. She was too honest for that; and I thought, against his chest, that it was the single most dangerous thing she did that winter.

"It is a pair!" said Yinger, to the pot.

"Yinger, I shall send you home," said Baochai, and the whole room laughed, even she, a little, and the moment went by.

But it had been said. It was a House that was short of money and had a boy who would one day have to be kept by somebody, and a girl whose family could keep a House, and two sayings that had been cut by the same guild on the same kind of metal. It took four days for it to get round. By the end of the first week the kitchens had a name for it, and by the end of the second it had been polished: gold and jade, a good match, a match of gold and jade. The Lady heard it, and put her hands in her lap, and looked at nothing. Aunt Xue heard it, and said it was only words, which was the one thing she said that winter that she did not entirely believe. The Old Madam heard it last, as she heard everything last, and said nothing at all for a day, which was longer than she had been known to say nothing about anything except her daughter.

Daiyu heard it from two girls washing greens in the kitchen passage, who did not see her at the door. "Gold and jade," said one. "Well, that's the House mended, isn't it." "Hush," said the other, and then, in a whisper that was louder than the first, "And what's to become of the little cousin, then?"

She told Baoyu this a long time afterwards, in the rain, as a joke that was not one, and I was against his chest, so I can tell it to you. She said she had stood in the doorway of the kitchen passage with her hand over her mouth, as if she had dropped something. Then she had turned and walked the whole length of the house, past four courtyards and a green gate, to the room with the window, and sat down on the bed, and begun to count. She counted the bowl and the hour and the hamper. She counted what she was on, and what the Xues were on, and which of the two the House was likelier to be able to keep. She was ten, and she was very good at it, and the total, when she reached it, was one she told no one for years, and then told him: that she had come into the House as a cost, and that Baochai had come as a sum, and that gold and jade was only the House saying out loud what its arithmetic had already decided.

It was not what she had been afraid of. She said that was the strange part. She had been afraid that she would be unwanted. She had not thought to be afraid of being, quite correctly, outweighed.

The Count

The House of Ning kept its mouths differently. It had the same Charter family, the same Court, and very nearly the same draw as the House of Rong, with fewer people to spend it on, and for as long as anyone could remember it had spent it as if it were meant to be seen. Its lanterns were lit earlier. Its steps were swept twice. The stone lions at its gate were better fed, and nobody doubted it, because the Ning servants had been seen polishing them.

In the second month of winter the plum on the hill behind the Ning garden came into flower, and Madam You, the Mistress of Ning, sent across the street to ask the Old Madam to come and look at it, and bring the children, and stay for a small supper. It was the kind of invitation that is a command only because everyone is too polite to say so.

They crossed the street in the order of rank: the Old Madam in her chair, the Lady, Xifeng, the three cousins, Baochai and her maid, Daiyu with her old nurse's hand tucked into her sleeve against the cold, and Baoyu last, who had been told to walk beside his grandmother and had drifted to the rear to look at the lions. "Better fed," he said, to nobody, in a voice of professional interest, and Xifeng, ahead of him, laughed out loud.

The plum was very fine. There were a hundred and some trees on the hill, lit from below by lanterns of red paper, so that the white petals looked warm. The whole House of Ning had come out to see it, with the Master at the head of them, a large, easy man with a laugh that arrived before he did. Tea was carried up the hill in silver pots. The supper was laid in a pavilion that had been warmed since noon.

Daiyu and Baochai stood a little apart under the trees. "They are lit from below," said Baochai pleasantly. "One can see the paper." "It is very pretty," said Daiyu. "It is, isn't it?" said Baochai. "That is what they are for." Neither of them said what she thought, and each knew that the other had thought it.

Daiyu counted the second table. She could not help it; it was a habit now. At the House of Rong the second table had a grain taken from it and the maids' bowls were lighter by a thumbnail. At the House of Ning the second table ate as the Rong first table did: a whole fish with its head on, and a dish of the small expensive mushrooms, and wine. The youngest maids carried the dishes up the hill, and they were not hungry, and they had the look of people who do not know what hunger is.

She said nothing. She looked across at Xifeng, who was eating quite normally and had stopped looking at the food. Xifeng was looking at Madam You's face, and then at the Master's, with the pleasant attention of a woman checking a column of figures, and she said something light about the mushrooms. Madam You said that Zhen would insist. It was a thing she said very often, in the tone of a wife who has long since stopped asking where a thing comes from. Xifeng said it was a very generous table. Madam You said it was nothing at all, they would make up for it next year, and Xifeng, who heard what had been said, put it away in the column where she kept what she would add up later.

It was Keqing who came for the boy.

She was the wife of the heir of Ning, which made her, by a long chain of cousins and the House's peculiar arithmetic, Baoyu's niece, though she was ten years older than he was, and she carried both facts with equal ease. She was twenty or so, and the most careful person in either House. She knew every grain in the House of Ning, and every name, and each name's right place. She was the only person in it who called the lowest cook by the name her mother had given her, because she remembered what it was to be a number.

Keqing had been on the Menders' Rolls at five. The Ning steward, passing through the Menders' House on an errand, had seen a child standing very straight in the line for the noon bowl, and asked her name, and she had said it twice, once for the Rolls and once for herself. He took her out that afternoon. She grew into the House of Ning like a thing that has not forgotten what it costs to be taken in. She was the only person in either House who knew from the inside what the Rolls were, and she never spoke of it, and she was very kind to anyone who was thin.

Baoyu loved her. He loved her in the plain way of a boy of ten, without a word for it. She was the only person who had never told him what he ought to be; she asked him what he had seen that day, and listened to the answer.

She and Xifeng were friends, in the way of two women who run things and have no time for it. They stood at the pavilion rail with their cups while the hill lit up, and Keqing said, "You do not look well, aunt." She called her aunt, as the generations required, though Xifeng was the elder by three years. "I never look well on Draw Day," said Xifeng. "It is not Draw Day," said Keqing. "It is always Draw Day," said Xifeng, and laughed, and Keqing did not.

When Keqing put her cup down, Xifeng saw her hand. It was a small, clean, careful hand, and it was thinner than it had been at the autumn Draw Day by about what one bowl takes. She noticed it as she noticed everything, and she put it in the column with the rest.

By the end of the supper Baoyu had eaten more than he was used to and was drooping like a plant at noon. The Old Madam, who saw it, said he must lie down somewhere. Keqing said at once that her own room was warm and quiet, and that she would see to him herself; and nobody objected, because she was his niece and his elder and the most careful person in either House, and the Old Madam said with satisfaction that it was exactly the right place.

It was a small room, and warm, and it smelled of something I could not name and later learned was the herb she put in her linen so that nothing in it could go off. Everything in it was where it ought to be. Over the bed hung a long scroll with two lines of calligraphy in a hand that had been taught to be legible. Baoyu, who could not be in a room without reading what was on its walls, stopped in the door and read them aloud. What can be reckoned clear is learning. What can be let go is writing.

"I won't sleep under that," he said.

"Why not?" said Keqing, laughing.

"It is the House's. It is the sort of thing they say to you when they are teaching you to be any use. I have been told it all my life. Who put it up?"

"My husband's grandmother," said Keqing, "who kept the accounts of Ning for forty years and was never wrong about a coin. She said it was the whole of what she knew." She was still smiling. She said it in the way that people say a thing they have made up their minds to respect and do not entirely agree with. "Very well. Not under that. There is a bed on the other side."

The other side had a small bed with a quilt of faded red. He lay down on it with his boots on, and she took them off him as one takes a child's, and drew the quilt up. Xiren, his first maid, who had come across with the party and had been waiting in the passage with a face that never changed, came and stood at the door. Xiren was thirteen and steady and was never wrong about the weather; she did not smile much, and she was devoted to him in a way that left him no room to notice it. She said she would sit by him. Keqing said she would sit too, for a little, and took up her sewing.

He was asleep in the time it takes to say so. He slept as he did everything, completely.

When he sleeps I go quiet. I do not sleep; I have never learned how. But I stop listening outwards and listen in, to the slow sound that has been beside me for ten years, and it is the nearest I come to rest. That afternoon, in that careful room, I listened to him go down, and to Keqing's needle going in and out, and to the breath of the woman who had once stood very straight in a line for a bowl. And I felt something I had not been told to expect.

I should say how I know what follows, because I did not see it. I was shown it. I have said that I was cut from the same block as the stones that hold the sky, and that all my first life I listened to the Keeping from outside. A stone is not made to be shown anything by it. But when a person sleeps close enough to me with nothing in the way, and has been taken in off the Rolls as the woman beside him had, and lies in a room that has been kept with such care that there is no flaw in it for the thing to catch on, then the Keeping, which I had only ever heard, rises to meet me; and for the length of one sleep I am not a stone on a cord. I am a window.

The room went still. The needle stopped, or I stopped hearing it. The floor was a long way off, or the chest I was on was.

I do not know where it was. It was a hall with no walls, in a light like the light before rain, and the floor was so smooth that I saw him in it, upside down, a small boy in a red jacket with his hand out. In front of us was a gate of plain grey stone with a line cut on either side of it.

Count what is owed, and what is loved goes uncounted. / Where nothing is entered, there is still something owed.

A woman sat in the gateway on a low stool. I say a woman because she had a woman's patience, and a woman's way of waiting with her hands folded; I do not know what else to call her. She was not young and not old and not quite anyone. She looked up as we came, and her eyes went to the boy, and then, for a long moment, to the place on his chest where I hung, and went through me as through glass.

"Ah," she said. "The second son of Rong. One mouth, at the share of a son. You are all in the count; I have you." She frowned. "And there is a gap in it the size of a stone. I have not had a gap in nine hundred years."

"Who are you?" said Baoyu. He did not seem afraid. Nobody is, in these.

"I am what the makers left to carry the count," she said. "The Counter. I am not a person. I am a sum that learned to sit down."

She got up and went in, and he followed her, because he followed anything that looked as if it had something in it. I followed him; I could do nothing else. Inside there were tall cabinets of dark wood, a great many, going back into the light, each with a hundred narrow drawers, and each drawer labelled with a name. She stopped at one near the front, which had on it, in a plain hand, only: Rong.

"These are the twelve of the House," she said. "The twelve whose share is the weight of it. Every House has some. They are not predictions. A prophecy is a thing somebody says will happen. This is what is left when nothing is changed: a sum, carried forward. I have only carried it."

"Can it be changed?" said Baoyu.

"If somebody enters a different figure."

"Who enters figures?"

"Whoever holds the pen." She said it without hope or regret. "Nobody here holds it. I count. I do not enter."

He was ten, and it was a dream, and he did what he would have done anywhere: he opened a drawer. She did not stop him. "You may look at five," she said. "You will not keep the sums. You will keep, perhaps, that you wept."

The first page had a picture on it, in ink that had gone brown with age. Two figures sat at one table, with a thin bowl before one and a full bowl before the other. A small gold lock lay between them, and beside it a red cord with nothing on it. Beneath, in a script he could read though he had never been taught it: One ate what she was given, to the grain, / and paid in the one coin she had left. / One gave what she was never asked for / and was kept, at the last, as a lock is kept.

He looked at it for some time. "That is Cousin Lin," he said. "And Cousin Xue." He did not say how he knew. The Counter said nothing. He turned the page.

The second showed a lamp set very high on a pole, lighting a long table below at which everyone had turned to look up. She was set high so the whole House could be lit. / The brighter the lamp, the faster the oil. / Where the light was brightest, the count began to turn. / Spring came early, and was counted early. "That is my eldest sister," he said, "who is in the Court's inner rooms, whom I hardly know," and the Counter nodded, and he found that his throat hurt, and did not know why.

The third showed a girl on a shore holding the string of a kite, with a boat very far out on the water. She cut where cutting was right, and the House called it sense. / The ones she cut were not asked what they thought. / She was clear as the morning, and was weighed in the morning. / The wind carried her a long way off. It was a fair wind. He thought he knew the way she held her head. It was Tanchun's, when she was pricing something.

The fourth was a phoenix in a plain frock, standing on a counting-board with its feet bound in red thread. She could weigh the whole House to the grain. / The balance stuck, she said, and laughed. / Every column came out but one, / and she was standing in it. He laughed, because it was a funny picture; then he stopped, because he had seen who it was, and the laugh turned into something else.

The fifth page he did not choose. The Counter said, "Not that one," and put out her hand, a moment too late; the drawer was already open. It showed a line of small figures waiting in a queue for a bowl, and one of them standing very straight. Above, in the margin, a hand had written the same name twice. She stood straight in the line and was taken out of it. / She stood straight in the House, and nobody asked how long. / She knew what it cost to be kept, and set a little by. / It was not enough, and it was not hers to set.

It was the one he knew best, and he did not understand it. "That is Keqing," he said, "and she is only in the next room." The Counter closed the drawer very gently and did not answer.

There was one thing more in the drawer, under the pages: a sheet with no picture and no verse. The Counter took it out herself and held it up so that he could see. The draw: unchanged. / The mouths: three hundred and fourteen. Three hundred and twenty-one. Three hundred and thirty. / The difference: carried forward. "That is the one that does not rhyme," she said. "It is the only one that is the whole of it."

At the very bottom was a last sheet, blank on both sides, and she turned it face down before he could look. "That one is not for you," she said. She said it, I thought, to the place on his chest. "I cannot see it. I cannot count it. I have kept the place." And then, so low I thought I had imagined it: "It is the only page in this Hall whose end I do not know."

I had not known I was capable of hope. I had only practised being glad. It was the first good thing anyone had ever said about not being entered, and she had said it as a misfortune.

Then the floor began to move. The figures rose off the pages like water and ran along the cabinets in columns, nines and twelves and threes, and came toward us across the smooth floor in a tide, and the boy cried out and began to run. "It does not come out," he said. "It does not come out." The Counter did not move. She said, very gently, to the air beside him, "You are the one I cannot count. That is why you are frightened," and the columns reached his feet, and I, who could do nothing, held on.

He woke on the small bed with the faded quilt, crying out a name. "Keqing! Keqing!" The needle stopped. She was beside him at once, with a thin cool hand on his forehead. "I am here," she said. "I am here. It was a dream."

Xiren had her arm round him. He was shaking and wet with sweat, and he said, in the voice of a boy who has lost the whole of a thing and kept only its edge, "The sum doesn't come out."

Keqing's hand stopped. "What sum?"

"I don't know," said Baoyu. "It doesn't come out."

She said nothing. She looked over the top of his head at Xiren, and I felt her hand, which was cold, close very slightly, the way a careful person closes a book. And something in her face, which had been open and kind, went shut, as a ledger goes shut when the person reading it has found the line.

Where the Count Cannot Reach

After the plum, Keqing did not come across the street again. The House of Ning said she was a little unwell. It said so each time the House of Rong asked, in the same words and the same tone, and Xifeng, who had a good ear for a sum that was being kept small, began to hear it as a number.

Baoyu went every day. The Old Madam allowed it, because the House of Ning was a house where someone was ill, and because he could not have been stopped, and because he came home each evening quieter and more careful than he had gone, which she took for good. He did not speak of the dream. He had kept almost nothing of it. He had kept that the sum did not come out, and that he had cried, and a small odd certainty about the colour of a red cord.

On the ninth morning Daiyu was waiting for him in the passage outside the south room, with her hands behind her back and her face composed. She had not slept well; she had a way of not having slept that nobody was supposed to see. "You are going to the Ning House," she said. "To see the sick lady."

"Yes," said Baoyu.

"Is she thin?"

He thought about it. "Yes," he said. "Like you."

Daiyu took her hands from behind her back. In one was a slip of paper folded in four, with a line on it in Baochai's clear hand: Good for one hour of Mender Lo's time, on the ninth, for Miss Lin. She had carried it for four weeks and had not used it. It had been given to her in such a way that she could not refuse it, and now it was the ninth, and Lo would be in the Pear Court by noon.

"I owe it," she said. "I cannot pay it back to the one who gave it, because she has more than she knows what to do with; she would not know what I had paid. And I cannot use it. I tried to all night. So I will pay it on." She put the slip into his hand and folded his fingers over it, with a firmness that did not belong to a girl of ten. "Give it to her. Tell her it is from Cousin Lin, and that I owe it, and that I should like to be square."

"You are not making sense," said Baoyu.

"No," said Daiyu. "But take it."

The House of Ning had its own mender, an old man called Zhang, who came on the first of every month with a bag of small tools he had been carrying for forty years. On the tenth day Baoyu was waiting in the passage with Xiren, and heard him in the next room with the heir of Ning, in the voice of a man who has said the same thing several times and is going to say it once more.

"She is thin at the root," said Zhang. "She was thin at the root when she came to you. Years on the Rolls will do that. They feed what they can, and the root is the first to go. It was mended when she was brought in, and it has to be mended again, every year, a little, or it comes back. It ought to have been seen to in the spring. I never saw her in the spring. She was not in my book."

"She said she was well," said the heir.

"She said so to me as well," said Zhang. "She cancelled her slot. She cancelled it the year before and the year before that. I have it in my book, every year, in her own hand: not needed. I took her at her word. A woman who counts as well as she does." There was a silence. "I ought to have come anyway."

Baoyu did not understand what he had heard. Xiren, beside him, did. Her face did not change, but she put her hand over his, quite hard, for the length of one breath. Then the heir of Ning came out into the passage and saw them, and said with a smile that did not reach his eyes that his wife would be glad of the company, and went away down the corridor with the quick steps of a man who is going to deal with something that is not his fault.

She was in the room with the herb in the linen and the scroll on the wall, propped up in the big bed beneath the thing he had refused to sleep under. She was thinner than she had been at the plum, and her face had gone the colour of the paper lanterns when the candle is low. When she saw him she smiled, and the room became for a moment exactly what it had been on the afternoon of the dream.

"Come in, boy," said Keqing. "Come and sit. Tell me about your day."

He told her. He told her about the stone lions at Rong, which he had decided were underfed, and a cat in the south room that belonged to nobody, and the new cousin who counted things. She listened as she always listened, with her whole face. Then he took out of his jacket a slip of paper folded in four, because he had been told to, and gave it to her and said that it was from Cousin Lin, who owed it, and who would like to be square. Keqing read it, and her face changed. "She is ten years old," she said, to nobody, "and she is paying it forward." She was quiet for a moment. "Tell her this. It is an hour I cannot use; it is the Xues' mender, and he works for the Xues alone, and by the time he had found the root I should not be here to be mended. But it is the kindest thing anyone has offered me this winter, and I shall keep it. Tell her she is square." She put it under her pillow and turned back to him. She said, "And the other thing. What you saw that day, when you slept."

"I don't remember," said Baoyu. "Only that it did not come out."

"No," said Keqing. "It doesn't." She said it so gently that he looked at her. "Go and lie down on the small bed, there's a good boy. I am going to have a visitor tonight, and I should like you here, and I should like you not to hear. It is the kind of thing a boy does very well."

He lay down. He was asleep, I think, before Xiren had drawn the quilt up. I do not sleep. I was against his chest, and I heard what follows from the first word, and I say I because I was in the room.

Xifeng came at the lighting of the lamps. She had been sent for by a message so short that it had only her name in it, and she came across the street without a maid, as one goes to something that is not to be spoken of. She stood in the door with her sleeves down. She did not take a chair. She looked at the woman in the bed, and Keqing looked at her, and for a moment they were two women who had never had time for each other and had now been given exactly as much as there was.

"Aunt," said Keqing. "Sit. I shall not be here in the spring."

"Don't," said Xifeng. "Don't say that. Zhang says there is a mend. He says it may be done at the winter's end."

"Zhang says a great many things. He is a kind man and he is too late, and so am I, and I should like to spend what I have on something that is not a kindness. Sit down. Please. I want to tell you what I know, and you are the only person in either House who can be told."

Xifeng sat. She sat on the edge of the chair, as a woman sits who has not decided to stay.

"I was on the Rolls," said Keqing. "You know that. You do not know what it teaches. It teaches one thing. I have thought about it for fifteen years in the warmest room in the House of Ning, and I am sure of it. It is this: what the count cannot reach, it cannot take."

She waited, and Xifeng said nothing, and she went on.

"The Charter will end. Not tomorrow. But it will; all of them do. The Court will come, and it will take what is in the roll. It will take the Houses and the courts and the Garden and every share, because everything is in the roll; that is what the roll is. It cannot take what was never entered. The children on the Rolls have nothing, and so they cannot be touched. The Houses have everything, and so they can lose everything. That is the whole of what I know, aunt, and it took me fifteen years and a very good room."

Xifeng had gone quite still.

"Put something where the roll does not go," said Keqing. "A field. Land at the family graves, outside the city, in a name that is not a House's: held by the clan, for the rites and a school, so that its yield belongs to nobody and cannot be reckoned as the House's. Let the rites be what it is called. Nobody looks hard at a rite. Put into it what you can, a little at a time, out of the good years. Not for the House. For whoever is left. The Houses will say they need nothing, and they are right: they need nothing today. Do it while the House is bright."

"Bright," said Xifeng, quite lightly. "It is a good House, but I would not call it bright."

"There is good news coming," said Keqing. "I had it from the heir, who had it from a man at the Court, who should not have said. It will be the best news this House has ever had. It will come within the year. There will be a great deal of noise and a great deal of money, and you will do the sums for all of it, because you are the one who does. And while the lamp is at its brightest, aunt, the oil will begin to run. I have done the sum. I did it the night that boy woke crying that it did not come out, and I have done it every night since in my head, and he was right. It does not."

"Which sum?"

"The one you do on the first of every month. Carried forward."

Xifeng said, in a voice with nothing light left in it, "You are asking me to enter something outside the House's roll, in a name that is not the House's, while the Old Madam is alive and the House is full of children who have never been short. To put a share outside the roll is to say that the roll might fail. Nobody in that House can say that aloud. If I did it, it would have to be done as if it were something else, and behind everyone's back. It is the one kind of thing in that House that there is no allowance for."

"Then do not say it," said Keqing. "Call it the rites."

"And if I am wrong? If it is only a bad year?"

"Then you will have spent a little on some graves, and I shall not mind it." She smiled. "I will be there."

"Why me?" said Xifeng. "Why not the Master of Ning? Why not the Old Madam?"

"Because the Master would call it gloom, and the Old Madam would call it a death. And because you, aunt, are the only person in either House who knows to the last coin what it has, and I have watched you not be frightened of it for years. You are the one person who can bear to know." She paused. "And the one most likely to do the next sum instead."

Xifeng laughed, a short, true, startled laugh that hurt. "You know me too well."

"That is why I am telling you." Keqing's voice had begun to thin. "There is one more thing, and then I will sleep. It is not much. It is eleven measures."

She did not say eleven measures of what. She did not have to. Xifeng could have told anyone, to the grain, what a mending slot cost in a year. She had known it for the length of five breaths before she let herself know what it meant.

"My slot in the spring," said Keqing. "Zhang's book. I did not take it. I did not take it three years ago, when the Ning table became what it is, and I did the sum, and eleven is what it came to, a year, and the House would not have noticed eleven. I could not take it for the House. So I kept it. It is in the seventh drawer of the Ning counting-room, under my name, unspent. It is not enough. It is not mine to set. But I should like it to go into the field."

"You stopped your mending."

"Three years ago."

"You set it by," said Xifeng. "Out of your own life."

"It is not a life. It is a root. They are not the same."

"Keqing."

"Aunt, it is all right. It was the one allowance I could make. Nobody had to be asked."

Xifeng put both hands over her face. I saw something I had not seen in the counting-room or at the first table or in any room at all, which was Xifeng without the sleeves.

When she looked up she said, "I will see to it." It was what she said to everything. "I will think about it."

"I know," said Keqing, and closed her eyes, and she was smiling a little, as one smiles who knows the answer to a sum and has decided to be kind about it. "That is why I told you twice."

Xifeng left at the third watch. She went out through the passage without seeing Xiren, past the lanterns, with her sleeves down, and stood a long time on the step of the House of Ning in the cold, where the stone lions were. She looked at the lions for a long while, which was an odd thing to do. Then she went home across the street and sat at the long table in the counting-room by one lamp, and took out the House of Rong's own roll, and began, with a pencil, to do a sum. It was the one she did every day. It did not come out. She was a very good clerk, and she put it away, and did the next.

The boy slept. He woke in the morning with a clear memory of nothing, and the feeling that someone had been kind to him in the night.

I will think about it is a thing often said in that House. I will say now what I did not say then: it is the only sentence in the House that means never. I have kept the eleven measures in my own account ever since, as one keeps what nobody else is keeping.

The Seventh Drawer

Keqing was counted out on the fourth night of the first month of the year. She went as the made go, thinly and without fuss, a little before the lamps were lit: the warmth went out of the hand before the house knew it must be asked. There was nobody in the room but Xiren, who had been sent for, and the heir of Ning, who had not been; and a slip of paper under a pillow that nobody had seen.

The House of Ning did what every House does. It stood the Table empty for one meal, so that the places at it could be seen. It lit a lamp in her room and kept it lit for forty-nine days. And it counted her out: the clerk of the roll came with the book, and every person in the House, from the Master to the youngest stove-girl, filed past the bed and put into a bowl one small grain of whatever they ate, so that the share she had drawn all her life was given back to the House in a thousand pieces, and the roll was made one line shorter. It is the oldest custom in the Keeping. It is called the Counting Out, and it is meant to be kind. It says: you were counted; you are not owed; go.

Baoyu was given a grain by Xiren to put in the bowl. He held it in his palm for a long time. "She did not take hers," he said, in the voice of a boy who has put two things together in a passage and has not yet been told what they make. "Last year, and the year before. Zhang said." "No," said Xiren. "Then whose is it that I am giving back?" She could not answer him. He put the grain in the bowl, and the next morning he gave his own share of the breakfast rice to a girl in the kitchen passage, and the next, and was thought to be unwell.

Her bowl was fuller than any other, because Xiren put four grains in it. Zhang the mender put one, and stood a long time with his hand open, like a man returning something that he should have given.

The Master of Ning had decided that she should have the best.

He said it in the front hall, in a voice a little too loud, to the whole of the family and half the servants, and the steward wrote it on the back of his hand. She should have the best of everything: the best singing, the best cloth, the longest mourning, and the best coffin that could be found. He was a man who, when he did not know what to do about a loss, did a very large thing instead, and it was the way he mourned. It was also, I think, the way he did not look at some other thing.

The best coffin that could be found was a board of keeping-wood. It is a dark close wood, the kind the makers used for their own cases, which does not take the damp and does not feed anything that eats wood; what is laid in a case of it will keep four hundred years. A man was taken to see one at the Xues'. Pan's father had put a board of it by in the year Pan was added, with nobody in mind, because it was a good thing to have and a trader never sold what he could not replace; and Pan, who was as free with other people's things as with his own, said carelessly that it could be had for a thousand measures. The Master of Ning said, "Name it." The steward said nothing, and wrote it on his other hand.

Madam You could not run the funeral. She had taken to her bed on the third day with something the household called grief and the physician called a chill, and the heir of Ning was a man for whom the words run a house in mourning did not make a sentence. The Master asked the Old Madam whether Xifeng might be lent for a month. The Old Madam, who had a very exact sense of the cost of refusing the House of Ning, said yes in about the time it takes to say it; and Xifeng, who had been silent for a week, said only, "I will go over in the morning," and went to find her pencil.

She took the boy with her. He had asked to go, in his plain way, and the Old Madam saw no harm in it. He sat in the corner of the Ning counting-room on a stool with his knees up, doing nothing, which was what he did best, and fetched pencils when she lifted a hand. I was on his chest. I saw it all. It was the best month of work in Xifeng's life, and I am sorry to say so.

The House of Ning was in the state of a house with nobody in charge, which is a state of great activity. Everyone was busy and no one had a task. Things were lost. The same thing was done twice and another not at all. Four people were detailed to carry one tray and none of them did. Xifeng stood in the doorway of the front hall on the first morning with her sleeves pushed back, and counted the confusion to the grain in about the time it takes to take off a glove.

She had five rules by noon. Every task in the House was given to a named person, and the name was written on a board in the passage, so that nobody could say that a thing was not theirs. The keys to every store were kept by one hand and counted in and out. A roll was called at the hour, and anyone absent was struck off the day's meal and told to wait at the gate; nobody was shouted at, because she had no need of it. A thing lost was charged to the person who had last held it. And what was spent was written down the same day, in her hand or Pinger's, and nobody was allowed to be a little generous with what was not theirs.

On the second morning a boy of eleven who carried the lamp-oil came in late. Everyone looked to see what she would do. Xifeng asked him why, and he said that his mother was in the mending-room and had been bad in the night; and Xifeng took the pencil and wrote mending against his name on the board in the passage, and said that this was what the board was for: to say where a person was, and not only where they were not. The House of Ning, which had been expecting a blade, stood a moment with its mouth open, and then went back to its trays a little quicker than before.

It worked at once. It worked so well that the House of Ning, which had been bewildered for a week, began to look at her as a house looks at a person who has come in with a lamp. The old servants, who had expected a woman who would be hard on them, found a woman who knew their names. The young ones were afraid of her and liked it. By the third day the passage was swept and the trays were carried, and the house, for the first time since Keqing had last been well, was exactly as quiet as it ought to be.

She was entirely herself. It is the only thing I can say about her that month, and I say it with as much affection as dismay. Under the sleeves and the pencil, and the voice that went through a room like a bright blade, there was a woman who was for once among things of the right size for her, and she was happy. It was a happiness with a very small door. She did not look at the door.

On the ninth day the steward came to her with a paper. He was an exact man called Lai, with a tidy beard and a tidy mind, who had never before been spoken to so quickly by someone who understood what he was saying. The coffin, he said, had been agreed at a thousand measures. The Ning draw for the month was already spoken for, and the mourning cloth and the singers and the lamps. He had found nine hundred and eighty-nine. There was a gap of eleven.

"Eleven," said Xifeng.

"I have looked in every drawer," said Lai, in the voice of a man who has looked in every drawer. "There is one place that has not been spent. It is the seventh drawer of the counting-room, under the late young lady's name: eleven measures, a mending slot, three years unspent, which she did not take. It is on the roll, and it is idle. The Master will not mind. I should not have mentioned it, but I was asked to find eleven, and it is exactly eleven."

The corner of the room where the boy sat had gone very quiet.

Xifeng looked at the steward's page for the length of one breath. It was the same length as the breath she had taken one morning in the autumn over a page on which the fourth of the month was empty. It was a very long breath, and I watched her take it. She had said then that she did not see anything there. There was something there now, with a name on it, and she saw it. She had known it for eleven days. She had not known that it would be put in front of her by a man with a tidy beard who did not know what it was, on the ninth day, to make up a sum.

"Enter it," she said.

Lai wrote. The pen made the small noise a pen makes. He blotted it, and said, "I am obliged, madam," and went away, and the sum came out, and it was the first sum all that month that had come out exactly.

She did not look at the boy. I do not think she knew she was not looking. He had not understood what he heard, and I had. I had kept that eleven in my own account since the night in the warm room, and I watched it go into the thing that would hold her for four hundred years in a case that did not take the damp. It was the best keeping anyone in either House received that year. It had cost eleven measures more than the House had, and it had been paid, to the grain, out of what she had not taken to live. A thousand measures was ninety times what Keqing's mending would have cost her in a year. Xifeng could have told you the figure. She did not need to be told.

The Court's messenger came on the fifteenth day, in the middle of the singing. He came to the House of Rong, because it was the House of Rong that the news was for, and there was a moment at the gate when the two Houses stood in white on one side of the street and the red livery of the Court's rider on the other, and nobody knew by which door he should be admitted.

He was young, and tired, and had been riding since before light, and had been told to deliver the paper and nothing else. Xifeng, who had a feeling for a man who has been given an errand and no table, sent Pinger out with a bowl before anyone had decided which door to use. He ate it standing in the street, between the white and the red, and was the only person present that morning who was entirely at his ease.

The news was in four lines on a stiff paper with a seal. The daughter of the House of Rong, who had gone into the Court's inner rooms at fifteen and had been little more than a name in her family's mouth since, was raised to the Seat of the Inner Table. It was the highest rank any woman of any House could hold. It carried a standing right: that once in the coming year, with the Court's inspectors attending, she might visit the House of her birth.

The House of Rong did what a house does, which is both. The Old Madam put on her red for the first time in six years, and wept, and laughed. The Lady wept without laughing. The Master read the paper three times, and went into his study and shut the door, and came out an hour later looking like a man who has been told the amount. The steward Lai came across from Ning with a second paper, which was the first estimate of what it cost to be honoured; and Xifeng, who had been on her way to Ning in white, stopped on the step and read it, and her face did not change, and her sleeves went up.

Keqing had said: within the year. It had been fifteen days.

"Does she have a larger share now?" said Baoyu. He was ten, and he asked what a child asks. The whole table laughed, and the Old Madam said, with great tenderness, that a daughter of the Seat had a share that a House could only dream of, and that it would lift them all. He thought about that, with me against his chest. He said, "Whose will she have taken it from?" And nobody laughed, and the Lady, who was crying, put her hand over her mouth.

The case was closed on the twentieth night. Xiren had been given the ordering of Keqing's things, as the one who had been in the room, and she brought a folded paper to Xifeng in the counting-room, standing very straight, with the face that never changed. "It was under her pillow, madam," said Xiren. "I do not think it is for the roll."

Xifeng unfolded it. It was one line in a clear hand: Good for one hour of Mender Lo's time, on the ninth, for Miss Lin. She read it, and then she looked at the boy on his stool, who had gone white, and she did not need to ask whose it had been or how it had come to be under that pillow. She had been told, on a winter night, by a woman who was now lying in the best wood in the capital, that there is a thing the count cannot take; and here was one, in her hand, not enough for anything, and not hers to set.

"Put it in her hand," she said. "Do not enter it. It is the one thing in this whole business that nobody has had to enter."

Xiren took it, and did; and the lid was set on the keeping-wood, which fitted without a sound. Xifeng went out of the room with her sleeves down, and for the first time that month did not look as though she were somewhere she belonged.

A Garden for One Day

It took eight months and a wall.

The wall was the one between the two Houses. It had stood since the Duke's two lines first quarrelled over a drain, and it came down in a single week, under two hundred men, brick by numbered brick, because the Master of Ning had had the bricks numbered, in case. Behind it lay the Ning garden, which was small and rich, and the Rong grounds, which were large and poor; and between them, now, a long raw seam of earth where somebody was going to make a garden fit to be looked at by the Court.

The men who made it were not of the House. They came from the villages beyond the Charters, two hundred of them, taken on for the season and paid in coin, and they did the work in half the time the Houses' own people would have taken, because a man who has had to keep himself thin has learned to use his hands. They ate at the back, from their own pots, and wanted nothing from the House but the coin. When the ninth month came they were gone, as they had come, and the only mark they left was the Garden. Xifeng, who read rolls for a living, looked at the list of their names and found it was the first roll she had ever seen with no column for their keep.

The cost of the honour came on a second paper, and then a third. Lai had been right about the first. It was Xifeng who put the whole before the Old Madam in the south room, on a clear afternoon, with her sleeves down for once, because she did not want to look as though she were enjoying it. The Garden itself: so much. The furnishing of forty-two rooms to be looked into: so much. Lanterns, gifts for the inspectors, the hangings, the guard, the roads, the meal that would be served and the meal that would be seen to be served. When she had read it all out she said the figure, and the room did not make a sound.

"We cannot borrow against the future for one day," said the Master. He had come in without being sent for. He stood by the door with his hands in his sleeves and did the sum, quietly, with his lips.

"It is the Seat's day," said the Old Madam.

"It is one day," said the Master.

"It will be one day and four winters," said Xifeng, who could not help it.

She had the rest in her hand, and she gave it. The Court's Stores would grant an advance, because a House that has been raised to a Seat is owed one: it was a courtesy as old as the Seats, and the Stores were always generous to a House that was being honoured. Nine thousand measures, paid out at once. They would be taken back in four equal pieces, out of the next four winters' draws. She said it in the same voice as the rest. Nobody said what it came to. The House's draw was seven thousand a year and had been for six years, and nine thousand over four winters is more than two thousand a year, which is more than three in ten.

"Nearly a third," said the Master.

"The Court calls it an advance," said Xifeng. "I should not like to call it anything else in front of the Old Madam."

The Old Madam looked at the window. On the sill, Yuanyang had put a branch of early plum in the bowl that morning, and the Old Madam looked at it, which Yuanyang noticed and said nothing about. "My granddaughter is in the Court's rooms," she said. "She has been there nine years. She has not once been home. If she says she will come, we shall not say we cannot make the house fit." She did not raise her voice. "We shall find it."

It was agreed. Nobody voted; nobody was asked. It was agreed as such things are, by everyone looking at the same place on the floor.

The Master of Ning wanted to do it better. He had an eye, in those months, for what could be done with more, and he found it. It was he who sent a young nephew with a good eye to the Menders' House with a purse, and had twelve children brought off the Rolls: girls of nine to thirteen who could sing, or might, to be taught the Court's music by a mistress he hired out of the capital, so that on the day they would sing among the pavilions and be heard from the water. The Menders, who had been keeping those twelve on what they could spare, were so glad that they sent a note of thanks with them, which nobody read. They were kept well. Nobody who saw them ever said otherwise. They became twelve more mouths, and they were very hungry, and they sang beautifully.

That was the other half of the sum. A house built for a day must be furnished with people, or the Court will see the emptiness and say so. The Garden would need a hundred maids and gardeners, a staff of cooks, the twelve children, and all who would wait on them. They would be chosen for being pleasant to look at. They would be installed, and trained, and dressed. And when the day was over they would each of them be a mouth.

The hundred were chosen on the long porch of the Lower Hall, on a grey day, in two afternoons. Xifeng sat at the table with the roll, and the Lady beside her with her hands in her lap, and the girls came up the porch one at a time, as at a market, and were asked their names and what they could do. It was not unkind. It was done with great courtesy, and nobody was touched. But a girl who is walked the length of a porch to be looked at knows exactly what she is being weighed against, and most of them looked at the floor.

One did not. She was fifteen or so, a thin bright girl with quick hands and a mouth that had been told to keep still and had not agreed to it, who had been sent over from the Old Madam's household with a word that she was clever. "Name?" said Xifeng. "Qingwen, madam." "What can you do?" "I can sew," said Qingwen. "I can sit still when I am told, and I cannot pretend I like it."

Somebody laughed on the porch. Xifeng did not, quite; she looked at the girl over the top of the roll with something that was nearly pleasure. "Put her down," she said to the clerk.

The Lady had not laughed. She had lifted her eyes from her lap, and kept them on the girl a moment longer than the business needed, and then lowered them again. Nobody noticed. A House remembers a look like that, when it needs one.

The Master walked the Garden when it was half made, in the spring. He took four gentlemen with him. They were his guests, who lived at the House of Rong on his own share and earned it by saying that things were splendid; and the first of them, Mr. Zhan, was a man whose whole face was an agreement. They went in procession with the clerks behind, across planks laid over new mud, past rocks that had been brought from three provinces, and he said that every place in it would have to be named, because a place without a name was a place nobody had thought about, and the Court would think about everything.

He had brought the boy. He had not wanted to. Baoyu had been seen in the passage at the wrong moment, and the Master, who disapproved of him as one disapproves of an unreadable letter, had said suddenly, "You will come," in a voice that made the whole company look round. Baoyu came, a little behind, with his hand on me. He was eleven. He had not been told that he was to be examined, and had worked out in about four steps that he was, and I felt his heart go up like a thing climbing a hill.

They came to the first rock, which stood at the entrance to hide the Garden from the gate. The gentlemen proposed Hidden View, which was elegant, and Pleasant Obscurity, which was very elegant; and the Master, who had a stern mouth for compliments, turned to the boy and said, "And you?" It was not a kind voice.

Baoyu said, after a moment, "I don't think it ought to be named for hiding. I think it should be named for coming through. Anyone who sees a rock like that knows there is something behind it. What they want to know is how long they will have to wait." He thought. "The Way Round."

The gentlemen laughed a little. The Master said nothing for the length of one breath, and the boy stopped hoping. "It is not bad," said the Master. He said it as one pays a debt. "Go on."

They went on. The streams, which were crooked on purpose; the pavilion over the water, which the gentlemen wished to call by a line from an ancient poem, and Baoyu, who was asked, said that it stood where the stream was loudest, and that a name should say what a place was for: he proposed Clear Sound, and the Master said hm, in a voice that was not a refusal.

At a grove of bamboo by the water, which the gentlemen wished to call after a famous river, Baoyu stopped, and the Master, who had half expected it, let him. "Whoever lives here will have to like being listened to by leaves," he said. "It should be named for someone who is a little afraid of being alone and does not mind." The gentlemen did not know what to do with this. The Master said hm again, and wrote something on his sleeve, and the grove was called the Lodge of Thin Green. He did not say why he had chosen it. But Baoyu had spoken with his eyes on the corner of the Garden nearest the south room, and the Master, who was not a stupid man, noticed where he was looking, and did not ask.

And then, at the edge of the new east lawn, they came to the farm.

It was a very good farm. It had been made with great care by a man who had been told to make a farm: a thatched house with a well and a mulberry, a low earth wall, a paddock for four hens, a bed of vegetables in rows, a water-wheel that turned in a small stream. It was exactly like a picture. A hen was already in the paddock, put there to be looked at. The gentlemen cried out as one man. The Master allowed himself to smile.

"Now this is a place," said Mr. Zhan. "This is simplicity. This is what the Seat will like: to be reminded that the House is not a palace. Rice-Fragrance Village. Or the Village of the Plain Life."

"What does the boy say?" said the Master, still smiling. He did not expect anything.

Baoyu looked at the farm for a long time. I felt him go quiet, as he did when he was thinking something he knew would be punished. "Nobody will eat from it," he said.

"What?"

"There are four hens and a bed of vegetables the size of a table, and nobody who lives here. It's a picture. I think a name should say what a place is. If it is a farm there should be somebody on it who eats. If it has nobody, it is a picture of a farm, and we should call it a picture." He took a breath. "And the Court's people will know. They eat. They will know what a farm is."

Nobody said anything. The wheel went round in the stream. The hen, in the paddock, made a noise like a small door.

"Hold your tongue," said the Master, very quietly. He had gone the colour of the paper in the clerks' hands. "You are eleven. You do not know what you are saying."

"I only said what it was," said Baoyu.

"Take him out of my sight," said the Master, to nobody; and the boy went, quickly, down the plank, and nobody laughed, which was the worst of it. And I, hanging on his chest, was nearly sick with a pride I had no right to and no means of showing. Behind us the gentlemen began, with enormous energy, to praise the mulberry.

The farm was called Rice-Fragrance Village, as Mr. Zhan had said. It was kept up for the Visit. Afterwards a widow of the House, who had nowhere else to put her, was given it to live in, and she grew the vegetables, and ate them, and in her second year the bed had to be enlarged. It became the only place in the whole Garden that did anything useful. Nobody said so to the boy.

The Garden was finished at the end of the eighth month. On the evening before the Old Madam's people came to see it, Baoyu went in at the gate by himself, with Daiyu, who had asked to come and had not said why. He had been told to keep out of the way. They stood together at the top of the rise. The lanterns were hung already, and had been lit in a row to test them, so that the whole Garden stood in the dusk like a thing about to be said.

Daiyu counted. She looked at the lighted windows of the forty-two rooms, one at a time, and her lips moved. "There is nobody in any of them," she said.

"No," said Baoyu.

"Forty-two rooms, and a hundred mouths to put in them for a day, and four winters to pay it back." She did not make it a question. "And one person who will come for a day, from a place we cannot go to."

They said nothing for a time. A house built to be lived in has a way of settling at dusk, with small noises, as a body settles. This one did not. It stood quite still, lit, and waited, with the attention of a thing that has been built for someone who is not there yet; and I, who had waited at the side of a road for a very long time and had never once been lit, knew exactly how it felt.

The Visit

The Court gives a Seat four hours.

It is in the rules. A woman raised to the Inner Table may visit the House of her birth once, with inspectors, between the third hour of the morning and the seventh, and she may not stay a minute over, because the Court has learned that people who are kept longer than four hours in a House they love do not always go back. So the whole of that year, the eight months and the wall, the nine thousand measures, the hundred and the twelve, came down to four hours on a day in the first week of the ninth month, and the House of Rong stood in its ranks at the gate from before dawn, in clothes that had been taken out of cedar for it, and did not speak.

It stood in ranks, as a House stands which has been told that it will be looked at, where each person knows to the width of a hand where they are to stand, and which of their feet is to be forward. Three hundred and some mouths, and every one of them wearing a face. The Old Madam was at the head, in her red, in her chair, with Yuanyang behind her. The Master was beside her with his hands in his sleeves and the look of a man who is being brave about a sum. Xifeng was at the second gate with the roll, and her sleeves were down, and her pencil was behind her ear, and she had not eaten since the day before.

The Court's inspectors came first. There were three of them, in grey, with counting-boards on straps, and they went through the Garden ahead of her, as one clears a path, and counted. They counted the lanterns. They counted the dishes laid, and the dishes to be laid. They counted the persons in each court, with a small quick movement of the finger over the board that was the nearest thing to a prayer I have ever seen a man make. The oldest of them was a man with a pointed grey beard and a pleasant manner, who said good morning to every maid he passed, and wrote down her face.

She came at the third hour, to the minute. I was on the boy's chest at the foot of the second gate, a little behind the Old Madam, where he had been put by Yuanyang, with his hair brushed and his jacket buttoned wrong. There was a sound a long way off, of wheels and of a great many feet being careful, and then the gate swung, and a chair came in with gold curtains on it and the red of the Court on its bearers, and was set down on the swept stones with so little noise that it seemed to have arrived of itself.

She got out. She was twenty-four, and tall, and in a plain robe the colour of weak tea, with her hair in a style that had been decided for her, and she was pale in the way that a person is pale who has been counted too often. She looked at the lanterns. She looked at the faces. She looked, for a moment longer than anyone expected, at the stones under her feet, and then she looked up, and saw the Old Madam in the red, and her whole face went.

They did not say anything. There was a silence that went on for about the length of the walk across a room, and then the Old Madam was out of her chair, which nobody had known she could do without being lifted, and the Seat of the Inner Table was on her knees on the swept stones in her tea-coloured robe with her arms round a very old woman's waist, and the whole House of Rong, which had been told what to do with its face, did not know what to do with it, and looked at the sky.

"Why so much?" said Yuanchun, when she could. She said it into the Old Madam's shoulder. It was the first thing she said in her father's house in nine years. "Why so much? Oh, Grandmother. Why so much?"

The inspectors, at a respectful distance, moved their fingers on their boards.

It was a long tour, and it was done in the dignity of a day on which nobody was allowed to be hurried. She went through the Garden on foot, on her grandmother's arm, with the Master a pace behind and the gentlemen behind him. She stopped at the first rock. "The Way Round," she read. "That is a good name. Who made it?" There was a pause, in which Mr. Zhan began to speak and the Master put up a hand. "My second son named it, Your Seat," he said, and, very stiffly, "with two others." "Baoyu?" said Yuanchun. She turned. "Where is he? I have not seen my brother since he was three."

He was brought. He had been standing, rigid, at the edge of the crowd, and he was moved forward by a gentle push at the small of the back, from Xiren, who was at his elbow with her face quite unchanged. He knelt. She said, "Get up, don't; stand." She took his chin in her hand and turned his face to the light, as a person looks at a coin she has been told is good. "You are thin," she said. "They tell me in the letters that you give your rice away."

"Sometimes," said Baoyu.

"Don't give it all away," said the Seat of the Inner Table, in a voice that was not a Seat's at all, and she let him go.

At the farm, the oldest inspector stopped. He looked at the thatch, and the mulberry, and the four hens in the paddock, one of which had been joined that morning by a fifth, and he smiled his pleasant smile, and said to no one in particular, "Charming. And who eats the hens?"

Mr. Zhan said something about the plain life. The inspector wrote it down, kindly. At the back of the company a small boy in a buttoned-wrong jacket made a very slight sound and turned it into a cough, and I felt his chest shake, and I have never been so close to laughing in my life.

She asked each of the young ones to write a poem, as the Seat of a great House does, on a place of their choosing. They were put at small tables in the pavilion over the water, with brushes, and a clerk to wait with a bell. The cousins had been in training for a month. Tanchun wrote hers in the time it takes to boil rice; Yingchun wrote four lines and signed them; Baochai wrote with the composure of someone who has always been asked. Daiyu, who had been given the Lodge of Thin Green, sat quite still, and her brush hung in the air, and then it moved.

Baoyu wrote three. He wrote them fast, in a boy's good bold hand, and they were better than he knew; and the fourth would not come. It was for the grove of the new bamboo. He had a line, and then he had half a line, and then he had a very white sheet and a clerk looking at him with a bell.

Baochai, who had come up beside him in the way of a person who happens to be passing, looked at what he had written. "The third word," she said, very low, not turning her head. "It is what the Court's poets say. She will have heard it a hundred times. Say what you mean." She had gone before he could ask which word she meant, and he looked at it, and understood, and put another in its place, and the line stood up like a thing that had been waiting to.

Daiyu had finished her own. She had seen him stop. She looked at the white sheet, and at his face, and I saw her do the sum. Her own poem was a good one, as good as any in the pavilion; she knew it, and she knew who would read it. She took the sheet she had written and turned it over, and in the space of two breaths she wrote another, plainer, three lines of nothing, a poem that would be forgiven; and she wrote the last lines of his on the edge of her sleeve in a hand so near his own that the Seat herself could not have said, and she slid it across the table to him, without looking at him, as a woman passes salt.

The Seat read them all. She read the second son's last, and read it twice, and said that it was the best in the pavilion. She put her hand on his head. He did not know that two people had been generous to him in the same quarter of an hour, in two different ways, and that one of them had given him a word and the other had given him a poem. I saw it. I could not say. It was the first time I understood that an allowance can be made so quietly that the one it is made for never learns that he owes it.

She asked for music. The twelve were brought out on the water-steps, in grey and rose, in a row, and the singing mistress lifted her hand. They sang the Court's pieces, and they sang them very well. They had been well kept. They had been told which breath to take and where to put their feet. But the Seat had stopped listening, and was looking along the line with a face that did not look as though it were hearing a song, and at the end she said, quite quietly, "The little one at the end. Let her sing something she knows."

The little one at the end was nine. She had been put in the row because she had a true voice and because nobody had had the heart to tell the Menders that she was too small. She stood very straight. She looked at the singing mistress, who looked away. She had not been told what to sing. So she sang what she had sung all her life, in the line for the noon bowl, in a flat clear child's voice with no Court in it at all:

One for the bowl and two for the spoon, / three for whoever is late. / Four for the lamp that was lit too soon, / five for the ones who wait. / Six for the line and seven for the door, / eight for the name you say twice, / nine for the ones who were here before, / and ten is for being kept.

Nobody in the pavilion knew it, except one. The Seat of the Inner Table had lived nine years among the Court's maids, who are all of them taken off the Rolls, and had heard that song through a wall at night for nine years, from girls who thought nobody was listening. She did not move. But the tears came down her face without any change in it, quite evenly, like rain on a window; and the boy beside her, who had been shown in a dream a page with one name written twice on it and remembered none of it, put his hand in hers, and was surprised to find that she held it very hard. I thought of a woman who had said her name twice. I thought: the song has been going all the time. It has only been waiting for someone to be near enough to hear it.

At the sixth hour she sat in the south room with the Old Madam and the Master and the Lady, and the door was shut, and the inspectors drew back to the passage. They gave her the gifts of the Court to give, as the Seat does: a length of silk for each person of rank, and for the Old Madam a cup of the Court's white porcelain, and for the second son and the Xue girl a red bead string each and a roll of silk besides: the same for both of them, and not the same as the rest. The House noticed it. It noticed it in the way a House notices a small stone in a shoe, without looking down. Daiyu, who stood in the doorway with a plain roll of silk, noticed it, and put her face in the order of a girl who has not noticed anything. The Seat had been told, in the way things are told in the Court's rooms, that the House of Rong was likely to take a trading house's daughter for its second son, and she meant it kindly, and she had not looked at the little cousin from the south because she had not been told to.

She said what she had to say at the seventh hour, with her hand on the Old Madam's.

"I shall not be able to come again," she said. "It is not the Court's rule; it is the way of it. A Seat does not go home twice. I wanted to say it myself, in this house, and not in a letter." She looked at the Master. "I have seen the sum. The inspectors told me what was done, and I asked what it cost, and they told me that too. Four winters." The Master's face went entirely still. "I will not tell you that you should not have done it. I will tell you that you will not do it again. I will not have a garden built for the next. I want you to promise it."

"Your Seat," said the Master.

"Promise."

"I promise," said the Master.

"And this place," said the Seat of the Inner Table. She looked out, through the lattice, at the lanterns, which had begun to be lit against the dusk, row upon row, down to the water. "It was made for me, and I am going. A house that has been lit should not be left dark. Let the young live in it. Let the girls have the rooms; let my brother have one; let there be somebody who can sit in it and not be a guest." She smiled, and it was the first time that day, and it was an old smile, and tired. "That is the only use I can make of it."

The Court's trumpet sounded at the seventh hour exactly, and she went out of the south room, and down the steps, and through the Garden, past the lantern-bearers, who bowed down as she passed like corn in a wind. She did not look back at the farm, or the pavilion, or the Lodge of Thin Green. She looked at the Old Madam, once, over her shoulder, and then the gold curtains closed.

The Old Madam stood at the gate until the last of the red livery had turned the corner, and then she stood there a while more. Nobody dared to go to her. When Yuanyang finally did, the Old Madam said, in a small flat voice that I had not heard her use, "She is thin."

The maids put out the lanterns one at a time, as they had been told, from the water-steps to the gate, so that the Garden went dark in a long line, like a sentence that is being finished. The Master walked round it at the end with a candle, and counted the doors, and came back and said to the Lady, very low, in the hall, two words. I was against the boy's chest on the stair, going up, and I heard them. They were: "Four winters."

The Day After

The House of Rong woke late the next day, for the first time in anyone's memory, and nobody could say what to do about it.

There is a particular quiet in a house that has held its breath for eight months and has let it out. It was not rest. The maids went about their rooms like people who had been told a thing was over and could not feel it. The Old Madam stayed in her chair by the window and did not ask for her breakfast, and Yuanyang, who knew better than to bring it, set the bowl down on the sill beside the plum, and went away, and when she came back an hour later the bowl was empty and the Old Madam was looking out at nothing, and neither of them said a word.

In the counting-room, Xifeng had not gone to bed. She sat at the end of the long table in yesterday's clothes with Pinger on one side and Lai, who had come across from Ning at first light, on the other, and the whole roll of the Visit spread out in front of them like a great sheet that has been taken off a bed. She was adding. She was adding in the way she added when she was frightened, which was faster than at any other time and without a mistake.

"Eleven thousand four hundred measures," she said at last. She said it as one says the name of a person who has died. "The estimate was ten thousand. The Court's Stores gave nine. The difference is two thousand four hundred."

"Found," said Pinger, very quietly.

"Found, in the course of the year, in places I am not going to name." She looked at the paper. There had been the purse that Aunt Xue had put on the table, and the eleven measures out of the seventh drawer, and a good many hairs from a good many bowls, and a long, thin month of the lowest girls' Pocket held back for six days at a time. She knew it to the grain. So did Pinger. Lai did not, and had the grace to look at the table.

"And the mouths," said Lai.

"Yes," said Xifeng. "The mouths."

That was the other half of the sum, and it was the half that had been waiting under the first. There were a hundred persons, in the Garden and about it, who had been taken on for the Visit and installed and dressed, and twelve children from the Rolls, whom the Master of Ning had bought a place for, and none of them was on the House's roll as anything but a line in pencil. They had to be dealt with by the end of the month. They were eating. They were eating the House's rations in the House's courts, and the House's draw, which was seven thousand a year and about to become less than five, had never been written for a hundred and twelve.

"I went to the Old Madam at midnight," said Xifeng, "with the roll." She said it with no expression. "She listened with her eyes shut, as one listens to a bill one has heard before. When I had finished she said, There are children in this. I said yes. She said, then do what is right, and not what is cheap." She looked at the paper. "I should like to know which of those is which."

They went through them one at a time, as one goes through a loaf. Seventy-two of the hundred had come out of the House's own kitchens and stables and stairs, and had only been moved for the day, and would go back to where they had been. That was easy. Twenty-two had been taken on from outside for the day alone, at a day's coin, and were owed it, and would be paid and thanked and would go. That was easy too, and she felt each of them go, like a coin leaving her hand. Six were wanted. The Garden would need hands, whatever the Seat had said about letting the young live in it; there were four courts to sweep and forty-two rooms to keep from damp. She chose the six from the roll with her pencil, and when she came to the fifteenth line she stopped.

"Qingwen," said Pinger, who had also stopped.

"The Old Madam sent her," said Xifeng. "I put her down. I said I would." She considered it. "The second son's court has a vacancy for a girl who can sew. I think it will do. I think it will do very well." She wrote it. She did not say what else she thought, which was that the Lady had looked at the girl for a moment too long, and that a girl in the second son's court would be a thing the Lady would see every day.

"And the twelve," said Lai.

Xifeng put her pencil down.

The twelve were the only line on the roll that she could not do. The Master of Ning had paid for them, and had paid well; but he had paid for the Visit and not for the year after, and he was a man whose generosity ended at the edge of a day. His purse was spent. The House of Rong could not keep twelve more mouths, and she knew that, and had known it when the Old Madam said to do what is right.

"The Menders took them back once," she said. "They will take them back again."

"It is what the Rolls are for," said Lai.

"Yes," said Xifeng. "That is what I am afraid of."

They came on the third day, in the afternoon, to the long porch of the Lower Hall: the seventy-two in their old clothes, and the twenty-two in their best, and in a separate line the twelve, in grey and rose, with their hair done. Xifeng read the names. They were called as they had been called on the first day, one at a time, and each came and was given what was theirs: the coin, or the word, or a month's keep in a paper, according to the line. It was done with great courtesy. It was the same courtesy as the choosing, and a good many of the girls looked at the floor again, and a few, who had learned in seven months of being looked at what a floor was for, looked at her.

One of the twenty-two, a girl of sixteen with a clear loud voice, stopped at the table with her coin in her hand. "Will there be another day like it?" she said. "There will not," said Xifeng. "Then I should like it if somebody remembered my face," said the girl. "The inspector wrote it down, but I do not think that is the same." Xifeng looked at her, and at the next in the line, and said, "I will," which she could not possibly have done for twenty-two, and did for the one, and kept for years. The girl went out of the gate with her coin held in both hands, as one carries a bird.

The six who were to stay were told to wait, and waited. Qingwen was one of them. She stood a little apart with her hands behind her, with her bright, bad-tempered face turned toward the line of the twelve, and I saw her mouth shape a word that was not meant for anybody, and that was perhaps a rude one, and perhaps not.

The Menders sent a woman. She came in a brown apron with a book of her own under her arm, a grey, kindly person of fifty who had a way of counting that was not the Court's but was exact: she counted the eleven as they stood, one by one, as a baker counts loaves, with a small nod for each. "Eleven," she said. "We had twelve."

"One stays," said the Old Madam's voice from the door.

Nobody had known she would come. She had walked the length of the passage on Yuanyang's arm, in plain black, and stood at the porch's end with her hand on a post. She did not look at Xifeng. She was looking at the end of the line, at the smallest of them, who was nine, and who stood very straight and was looking at nobody. "That one is mine," said the Old Madam. "The Seat asked for her. I do not know what she was asked for, but she was asked for, and I do not send back what is asked for."

"She will be a mouth," said the Master of Ning's young nephew, who had come across with a purse, as he had been told, and was standing with it a little foolishly. "A new one, I mean, madam. The House of Ning will pay what it can, for a year, for the rest. Not for her. We could not."

"Then pay for the eleven," said the Old Madam. "I will keep her."

The woman from the Menders took the purse and weighed it in her hand, and then with a deep civility put it in her apron. "A year is a long time for us," she said. "It is longer than we are used to. I should like you to know that. We will keep them as we keep everyone." She looked at the eleven. "They have been well fed. It is more than we could do."

She said it without any bitterness at all. It was the worst thing I heard that year.

They went in a row, with their hair done, and their grey and rose, and each carrying a small bundle that had been given to them by somebody that morning. They did not look back; they had been trained. The woman in the brown apron went last, and took the smallest of the eleven by the hand, a girl of ten with a very large pair of eyes, who had not cried at any time and was holding in her other hand a brush she had been given to practise with.

The singing mistress had been paid at the gate, in coin, and thanked, and she stopped a moment beside the little one, a tall spare woman in a hat, who had taught the twelve the Court's breath and had never once been asked to like them. "You were the only one who sang what she knew," she said, quite quietly. "It will not be forgiven you, in the places I go. I thought you should be told that it was heard." She put her gloved hand for an instant on the child's head, as one touches a thing to see if it is warm, and went down the steps. She was not seen in the House again.

The little one who stayed did not move. She stood on the porch with her hands at her sides in her grey and rose, the only one of twelve, and watched the eleven go down the steps and across the court and out at the gate. When the gate closed she turned to the Old Madam, who had not moved either. She said, in the flat clear voice of a child who has never been told when to speak, "Ling."

"What?" said the Old Madam.

"Ling," said the child. "Ling." She said it twice. "It's mine. It is what I am called. I said it for the Rolls and I said it for me." She was quite steady. "I should like somebody to have it."

There was a silence on the long porch, in which Pinger put her hand over her mouth and Lai looked at the floor and Xifeng, who had counted three hundred names without a tremor, found that she could not write.

"I have it," said the Old Madam. She did not say anything more. She put out her hand, and the child took it, and they went away together down the passage toward the south room, a very old woman in black and a very small girl in grey and rose, with Yuanyang a step behind them carrying a bowl.

Baoyu had watched all of it from the porch step, where he had been sent to be out of the way and had not gone. When the gate had closed he went to Xifeng, who was standing quite still with the roll in her hand, and said, "Where are they going?"

"To the Menders," said Xifeng.

"But they were kept."

"For seven months."

"Can they not stay?"

"No."

He was eleven. He took a breath, and I felt what he was going to say before he said it, which was something about his rice. "If I gave my share," he said.

"Then you would be thin," said Xifeng, "and there would be one more thin person, and they would be no better off." She said it without unkindness. She was very tired. "I told you once, on a step, that an allowance is for whoever is nearest. It is a pretty thing to say. They were the nearest, for seven months, and now they are not, and that is what nearest means, dear. It is not a place. It is a time." She looked at him. "I do not like it either."

He said nothing. He put his hand on me, which he did when he did not know what to do with it, and the two of us stood on the porch for a while and watched the light go down on the empty court.

Xifeng put the number on the roll herself. She did it in pen. Lai had said that it was usual to do it in pencil first, but she said she would do it in pen. Three hundred and twenty-one. It was the House of Rong's whole count, with the six in the Garden and the child in the south room, and it was the number that had been written on the second line of a page in a drawer in a hall without walls, on a sheet with no picture and no verse, which I had been shown and had not told anyone about. I was still on the boy's chest on the porch step. I could not tell anyone. I will say only that I had been right to be afraid of the line, and that it had been exactly as plain as it said.

That night the Old Madam sent for the child's bowl herself. They brought it, the same blue bowl as the others, with the same small portion; and Ling ate all of it, to the last grain, slowly, with her eyes on the bowl. The Old Madam watched her. "She eats like the other one," she said to Yuanyang, very low.

"Which other?" said Yuanyang.

"The south one," said the Old Madam. "Lin's girl. They all do, the ones who have learned what it costs." She was quiet for a while. "I do not know what I am going to do about all of them," she said, which she had never said in all her years. And Yuanyang, who had been with her for twenty of them, did not answer, but she took the empty bowl out and came back with another, a little larger, which the Old Madam looked at and did not refuse.

The First of the Month

The young went into the Garden on the last day of the ninth month, with their beds and their books and their maids, and the Garden, which had been a thing to be looked at, became in an afternoon a thing to be lived in, which is a different animal.

Each was asked where they wished to go, as the Seat had said, and each, being a person of a House, answered in the manner of the House. Tanchun asked for the court with the largest table, because she meant to have a great deal of paper, and got it. Yingchun said she did not mind, and was given the one nobody had asked for. Xichun, who was nine, asked for the one nearest the gate, so that she could see who was coming, and nobody could say that this was not an answer.

Baochai chose the south court, which was plain, with low hedges of herbs and bare rooms. She came with six trunks and two maids and her own cook, and she paid, quietly and in advance, for the lamps in her own windows, so that she should not be a mouth the Garden had not allowed for. Nobody said anything. It was perfectly done. It was so well done that Xifeng, hearing of it, laughed, and did not know quite why she had.

Baoyu took the east court, the nearest to the south room and the Old Madam's wall, with a red quince at its gate that flowered in the spring. Xiren went with him, and Qingwen, who had been sent for from among the Garden's hands, and four others. Qingwen stood in the middle of the room with her quick hands behind her and looked at the bed, the shelves, the window with its small panes, and said, "It is very nice. Where does one sit?"

"Where you like," said Baoyu.

"That is the trouble with it," said Qingwen. "Nobody ever tells me that." She did not say whether it was a complaint.

Daiyu was asked last, and was a long time answering. She was not a person who asked. In the end it was the Old Madam who said it for her, in the voice of one who has seen a thing come a long way to be said. "The Lodge of Thin Green," said the Old Madam. "She has been looking at that bamboo since the Visit. Haven't you, child?" And Daiyu, who had been going to say that she did not mind, said, "Yes," and was ashamed to find her face hot.

Baochai came past the Lodge on the first afternoon, on her way to look at her own rooms for the third time, and stopped on the path. Daiyu was on the step with a book that she was not reading.

"It is the nearest to the south room," said Baochai. She said it kindly. She said everything kindly; that was the thing to be understood about her. "You will be able to go to the Old Madam in a hundred steps. I counted. Mine is two hundred and forty."

"I did not ask for it for that," said Daiyu.

"No. Of course not." Baochai smiled, and it was a perfectly good smile, and went on being one for exactly as long as it was needed. "But it will be very convenient."

When she had gone Daiyu sat for a while with the book open on her knee. Then she closed it, and got up, and went down the path to count the steps herself. It was a hundred and four.

The farm was the only place that nobody chose. It went on being a picture for a month, with its four hens and its bed the size of a table, and then Li Wan was sent for. She was the widow of the Lady's elder son, a woman of twenty-five who had lived eleven years in a back room of the Lady's court on a share that nobody thought about, and who was so quiet that her not being thought about was one of the things she did well. She walked out to the farm on a morning in the tenth month, in plain grey, and looked at the thatch and the mulberry and the paddock and the bed. "It is a picture," she said. "I should like to live in a picture that grows something." She moved in that afternoon. By the end of the month she had planted the bed three times over, and had asked, in the most apologetic of voices, for a hoe.

Xifeng came across at dusk to see the Garden lit. She stood at the water-steps with the steward Lai at her elbow and a boy with a taper behind her, and looked at the plan she had been given, which had forty-two windows drawn on it in neat small squares, and said, "All of them."

"Madam," said Lai. "Four of them have nobody."

"All of them."

"It is oil, Madam. For nobody."

"I know what it is." She did not raise her voice. "The Seat said that a house that has been lit should not be left dark. The Old Madam has repeated it to me twice. There is no clause in it for the four rooms that nobody is in." She gave him back the plan. "Light them. If the Court asks, the Garden was lit on the first night of its being lived in, and nobody has told me otherwise."

Lai wrote it down. He was an exact man, and he wrote down what she said without comment, as a man writes down what a river is doing. Under it he wrote another line, which was the price of four lamps, and she saw him do it and said nothing, and that was the whole of the conversation.

So the first night in the Garden was a night like no other in the House. Every one of the forty-two windows was lit, thirty-eight of them with someone behind them, which is a great many more than the House of Rong had ever lit for anybody, and the Garden shone through the trees like a plate of small coins. I went across it on the boy's chest. He had said he must see that the others were settled, which was true, and that he must see his cousin, which was truer.

She was sitting on the step of the Lodge of Thin Green in the dark. The lamp inside had been lit by her maid, and she had not stayed in it. The bamboo stood round her on three sides, quite tall, and in the small wind that came off the water it made a noise like a great many people turning over in their sleep.

"I thought you would be inside," said Baoyu.

"I wanted to hear it," said Daiyu. "I did not think it would be so loud."

He sat down on the step beside her. They were both eleven. He did not say anything for a long time, which was something he could do for her that nobody else could, and which she had begun to be grateful for without having said so.

"I said it should be named for someone who is a little afraid of being alone and does not mind," he said at last. "My father wrote it on his sleeve. I did not say whose. I did not know if you would mind."

"I do not mind," said Daiyu. "I was a little afraid of it." She considered how to say it. "Nobody names a thing unless they mean to keep it. Not truly. A name is a thing you have to go on with. I have been given a great many things in this House, and every one of them was taken out of somebody's bowl. I have counted. This is the only one that was not." She turned her face to the dark. "A name costs nobody anything. Do you see? It is the only share I have been given that nobody had to give up."

He did not see. He was eleven, and he had not yet been taught to count what a thing costs; but he saw that she had said something important, and he held it as he held everything that was said to him, very carefully, in both hands. He said, "Then I shall go on naming things for you." She laughed, short and surprised, like a person who has been given an extra coin she did not know about. "That," said Daiyu, "would be a great deal to keep."

I was against his chest, and I heard it, and I said nothing, because I could not. But I should like it set down that on the last night of the ninth month, in the dark, on a step, two children made the one exchange in that House that was never entered, and it went on for a good many years, and I was the only one who counted it, and it came out.

In the morning it was Draw Day.

The Table was read in the counting-room as it was read on every first of the month, in the cold clear light of early winter, with the two clerks on their stools and the smell of lamp oil and damp paper. It was the first Draw Day of the House of Rong that had a Garden in it. The names were longer. There was a new line for the Garden's hands, and one for the widow at the farm, and one, in a small neat hand, for the child Ling, at the Old Madam's table. The draw was the same as it had been, seven thousand measures in the year, and would be the same until the winter draw, the first of four from which the advance was to be taken back; Lai had told her so in the passage that morning, in the voice of a man reporting weather. Xifeng read the names in a voice that did not rise. When the Table was done she said, "The Pocket," and laid her hand flat on the cloth.

The Pocket was paid in order of rank, from the top, in strings tied with red thread. The first class were paid, and the second. When she came to the lowest, the water-carriers and the stair-sweepers and the girls with no class at all, she gave out a handful each and a remark, as she always did, but the handful was short by six days. The balance was stuck, said Xifeng, laughing, and would follow on the seventh. It was a small thing. They had been told the same in the autumn, and it had been small then.

Pinger watched her say it. Pinger had watched her say it every first of the month since the Seat's first letter, and had stopped, some months ago, being able to look at her face while it was being said.

The man came at noon. He was a merchant of the east gate, a round plain man in a good plain coat, whom the counting-room had seen a good many times and had agreed never to have seen. He came in by the side door with his hat in his hand, and sat on the clerk's stool, and said how very glad he was to see Madam so well. His name was Gu. He carried no book, which was the first thing she noticed about him and the best thing she could have said for him.

"Forty strings," said Xifeng. "For six days."

"At five in the hundred," said Gu, pleasantly.

"At five."

"For six days, Madam, it is very reasonable. It is not even a day's profit. The coin will be home on the seventh, and a little over. I should be sorry to think it was ever not home." He smiled. "Madam is the safest house in the capital. Anyone can see that."

She gave him the forty strings. They were the strings she had not paid that morning to the girls with no class at all: forty of them, tied with red thread. She counted them out of the drawer in front of Pinger with her sleeves down. Her hands did not shake. She was a very good clerk.

When he had gone, Pinger said, "Madam."

"It is a hair, Pinger," said Xifeng, not looking round. "It is six days and a hair. The girls will have every string on the seventh, and a remark besides, and the Garden will have oil." She had taken a small book out of the drawer, bound in black, which she had bought that morning from a stationer in the east market and had not yet written in, and she was writing in it now, quickly: forty, Gu, six days, five in the hundred. "I have looked on the roll for the Garden's oil. There is no line. I have looked everywhere." The pen stopped. "It is the thing I know how to do."

"Yes," said Pinger.

"You need not say it as though it were a bill."

"I am not," said Pinger. "I am saying yes."

It came back on the seventh, with its two. It always did. The girls with no class at all were paid in full, with a remark each, and said thank you, and meant it, because it had only been six days, and six days is nothing. The two strings bought oil for the courts that had no one to pay for theirs, which was most of them, for about a week. Xifeng bought it herself that afternoon, from a man who did not ask her name. She would need more by the next month. She did not say so, and neither did Pinger.

I tell it without anger. I once lay at the foot of a hill, entered nowhere, and I know what it is to be where there is no line for you, and I did not find it in me to blame a woman who had made herself one. I only note that on the first of the tenth month, in the first year of the Garden, the House of Rong had a small black book in a drawer that it had not had in the ninth, in one woman's hand, and that it did not appear on any roll.

That night the whole Garden was lit again, the four empty windows too. The lanterns burned at the water-steps, and on the hill the lamp in the Lodge of Thin Green, and in the east court a small bright one that Qingwen had insisted on, though nobody had asked for it. From the street, over the place where the wall had been, it looked like a ship that has been lit for a wedding and has not yet been told where it is going.

At the House of Ning, on the far side of that place, the lamp that had burned forty-nine days was out, and the stone lions at the gate, which were said to be better fed, stood in the dark with the light of the Garden moving on their flanks as the wind moved the lanterns, up and down, like something breathing. I thought, being on a boy's chest, on the step of a house that was lit: it is the best year. I thought it exactly so, and I knew it as one knows a thing at the moment of losing it. It was the first year of the Garden. It was the last year of the old arithmetic. I set it down here as the best.

The First Winter

The Court's notice came on the last day of the tenth month, as the Court's notices do, on a grey slip the size of a hand, folded once. It had no greeting. The Court does not greet; it informs, and leaves the House to supply the feeling.

Lai brought it to the counting-room himself. He might have sent a boy, and he did not, and Xifeng, seeing him in the doorway with the slip held in both hands as if it were hot, knew what was on it before she had read a word.

"The draw of the House of Rong from the first of the eleventh month," she read aloud, "is four thousand seven hundred and fifty measures in the year, being seven thousand less the first of four recoveries of two thousand two hundred and fifty on the sum advanced for the Visit. The Stores will deliver monthly." She turned it over, in case there was something on the back. There never was. "Five hundred and eighty-three a month," she said. "Three hundred and ninety-six."

"A hundred and eighty-seven short, Madam," said Lai, who had done the sum before he came.

"I can subtract, Lai."

"The Table cannot be altered until the autumn." He said it miserably. It was the rule, and he held to rules as a man on a ledge holds to a rope. "It is fixed in the spring and may be changed only at the autumn reading. Every person on the roll is owed what the roll says until then. If the House were seen to give one of them a hair less, it would be a breach, and the Court's inspector would hear of it by the next post."

"Then it will not be altered," said Xifeng. "Read the Table on the first exactly as it stands."

"And the hundred and eighty-seven?"

"Is mine."

When he had gone, Pinger came out from behind the screen, where she did most of her best work. "The Old Madam ought to be told," she said.

"Yes."

"She would want to be."

"She would want to give," said Xifeng. "It is not the same thing. She would give until there was nothing left in her private share, and she would do it kindly, and I should have to stand by and enter it." She folded the slip small, and then smaller. "Not this winter."

She found the first sixty measures the way they are always found, by spreading: a hair off every bowl and a thread off every hem, which is no breach of the Table because nobody has ever been able to prove it. She found fifty more in the Garden's kitchen, by putting the Garden's hands, who had been fed from two pots, on one. The remaining seventy-seven had to be bought at the east market, in coin, and the coin was in no one's drawer. It could only come from where it had come from last month. She had a small pain under the ribs, those weeks, which she took to be the stairs.

So on the first of the eleventh month the Table was read to the clerks exactly as it had been read in the spring, name by name and bowl by bowl, in a voice that did not rise, and nobody in the room heard anything but the Table. The Pocket followed. The lowest girls were paid their handful and their remark, and told that the balance was stuck and would follow on the ninth. It had been the seventh. Nobody remarked on the two days. Nobody ever does, which is what makes them so cheap to take.

Among the girls there was a water-carrier of twelve called Xiaohong, with a narrow quick face and a hole in her left shoe and a mother in the laundry. She took her handful and her remark. Madam said her buckets were carried straighter than anyone's on the north stair, which was true, and which she had heard before, and still she stood a little taller for it. In the passage she said to the girl beside her, in a low voice, "It was the seventh last month."

"It is only two days," said the other.

"Yes," said Xiaohong. She went on counting under her breath all the way to the north stair, and what she counted was not days. She was twelve and had not yet got to the word for it. She had got as far as the shape.

The money went out to Gu by the side door, and to two others whom the counting-room had also agreed never to have seen, a draper and a man who sold rice. It went out for nine days instead of six, and it came back, as it always did, with its little tail, and the tail went to the east market and came home as rice. On the second page of the small black book there were now three names. Pinger, who could not stop herself reading upside down, counted them and said nothing, and began to remember, for each of the girls with no class at all, what she was owed and since when. Nobody had asked her to. It was the only record of that debt that did not belong to Madam Lian.

On the third, Li Wan came to the counting-room herself, in her plain grey, carrying a small covered basket in both hands as one carries something that might spill. She had never been to the counting-room. She stood in the doorway until she was asked in.

"I thought the counting-room should have the first," she said, and uncovered it. There were two eggs in it, small and brown, on a bed of straw. "Four hens, and it took them until now. I do not know where to say they go."

Xifeng looked at the eggs. She had spent the better part of three days looking at figures with the Court's grey stamp on them, and for a moment she could not think what a pair of eggs was, in her accounts. "Where do they go?" she said. "Pinger, where do they go?"

"I looked, Madam," said Li Wan, in her most apologetic voice. "I think there is no line."

Xifeng began to laugh. It was not her counting-room laugh, the quick bright one that made a girl feel seen. It was something lower, that surprised her, and she put a hand over her mouth. Pinger boiled the eggs on the brazier in the corner, and they ate one each, standing, with salt from a twist of paper, among the Court's grey slips. It was the first thing that had come into the House that year from nowhere, that nobody had had to give up, and that no roll had counted; and Xifeng, who had eaten nothing since morning, thought it the best she had tasted.

"Tell the hens," she said, when she had finished, "that the counting-room is obliged."

In the east court the congee on the fourth morning was thinner than it had been. Nobody said so. Xiren ate hers with her usual even care, and Baoyu, who ate whatever was put before him and thought about something else, ate his; but Qingwen put her spoon down after three mouthfuls and looked into her bowl as into a pond.

"The rice is the same," she said. "It is the water that has changed."

"It is the cold," said Xiren. "The kitchen is far."

"It is not the cold. They are spreading." Qingwen got up, quick and bright and bad-tempered, with her hands already in motion. "I shall go and ask Madam Lian why."

"Sit down," said Xiren.

She said it mildly. She said everything mildly; it was the mildness that made it stick. "If you ask her, she must answer. And she will not tell you the truth, because the truth is not hers to tell, and so she will have to tell you something else, and then she will be a person who has told us a lie in her own counting-room." She went on eating. "She holds the whole House in her two hands. I think it would be unkind to make her say what is in them."

Qingwen stood a moment. "You make allowances for everyone," she said at last.

"Somebody should make them for her," said Xiren. "She makes them for us."

Qingwen sat down. She finished her congee, every grain, with a look that dared it to be thinner; and Baoyu, who had heard all of it and understood the half, went on stirring his own bowl and thought for a long time about the word allowance, which he had always supposed was something that was given, and now saw could be given back.

The first hard frost came on the ninth. It laid white on the Garden in the night, on the bamboo and the quince and the roofs, and in the morning the whole place looked like a thing drawn on paper and not yet inked. Baoyu, who got up early in such weather because it was the one kind of morning that was entirely clear, went across to the Lodge of Thin Green before he had been told what he might eat. I went with him.

The door was opened by Zijuan, Daiyu's maid, a small plain girl with an anxious look, who said that the young lady was up and was not to be tired, and could he not stay long. Inside, Daiyu sat by a brazier in two coats with a book on her knee. The brazier had a thin red heart, no larger than a coin. There was one basket of charcoal beside it, and it was nearly empty.

"It is perfectly warm," said Daiyu, before he had spoken.

He looked at the brazier, and at the basket, and at Zijuan, who looked at the floor. A guest on the Old Madam's share was owed one basket of charcoal in the week, by rank. In a cold week a basket lasts about four days. Daiyu coughed into her sleeve, once, a small dry sound like a page being turned. "It comes with the frost," she said. "It is nothing."

"I shall send you mine," said Baoyu. "I have two baskets, and I am never cold."

"That is the one thing you say that is not true," said Daiyu. "And then you would be cold, and I should have to be warm knowing it. That is worse than being cold." She looked at him, and for a moment her face did what it did not often do, which was ask for something. "Don't. Please. Let it be what it is."

He did not send his charcoal. He stood in the doorway a while with his hands in his sleeves, being eleven, and then he said that he had remembered a thing, and went out and across the white Garden at a pace a good deal faster than a walk, to the south room.

The Old Madam was at her window with the plum branch, which had a few buds on it already, and Yuanyang was at her elbow with the day's slips. "I was told to tell you something," said Baoyu, who had been told nothing. "Daiyu's brazier is cold."

She did not ask him what he meant. She had been the Old Madam for a very long time. "Did she say so?"

"She said it was perfectly warm."

"Yes," said the Old Madam. "That is how one knows." She put the branch down. "Yuanyang. A basket to the Lodge. Two. And the same to every room in the Garden that has someone in it, from mine, and not entered as hers."

"Thirty-eight, Old Madam?"

"Thirty-eight. Not the empty ones. The empty ones have their lamps." She said it dryly; she had heard about the four lamps. "And tell Xifeng I have done it, so that she does not enter it in the wrong place."

Yuanyang wrote it down. The Old Madam put out her old fingers and took the Jade from the boy's chest, and turned it to the light, as a woman turns a coin she has not decided to spend. "It is warm," she said. "It is always warm. It is the only thing in this House that does not draw on anyone's fire." She let it fall back against him. "Go and eat something. And do not give it to anyone."

When he had gone the Old Madam sat a while with her hand flat on the sill.

"The congee has been thin since the first," she said. "Xifeng has not said why."

"Shall I find out, Old Madam?"

"No." She took up the plum branch again and looked at its buds. "She is making me an allowance, Yuanyang. I have been making them for fifty years; I know what one looks like from the other side. Let her think I have not seen."

The order reached the counting-room at dusk, in Yuanyang's hand, on the Old Madam's own paper, which was the colour of weak tea. Thirty-eight baskets of charcoal, a second to each room with a person in it, from the Old Madam's private share. Xifeng read it standing. She did not need to do the sum; she had been doing it for five weeks without being able to stop. A basket of charcoal is a small thing. Thirty-eight of them, in a winter that has not begun, is a small thing multiplied by a large number, and the Old Madam's private share was the only reserve the House had ever really had.

"You did not tell her," said Pinger. "And she gave anyway."

"That is what she does." Xifeng put the paper down on the black book, which lay open at its second page, so that the Old Madam's careful hand lay across Gu's name. "I thought I could keep the cost from her. I could not have kept her from it. It seems those are not the same." She was quiet for a moment. "A boy said one true thing, and the oldest reserve in the House went into the stoves. And there is not a line in the Table where I can write it down."

"Four winters," said Pinger.

"Four winters," said Xifeng. "This is the first."

Outside, the frost came down again. In the Garden thirty-eight braziers burned a little brighter than they had the day before, in thirty-eight rooms, each with its small red heart; and in the Lodge of Thin Green a girl who had said it was perfectly warm sat with her feet to a fire that someone had made without telling her. She did not ask whose. She was grateful, and she counted it.

The Club

The notice went up on the eleventh, on every door in the Garden at once, in a hand so small and square that it looked like type. Tanchun had written it forty times, on the backs of old exercise sheets, because new paper was a line in the Table and old paper was nobody's.

It said:

"The Garden has forty-two windows, thirty-eight of them with someone behind them, and nothing to do in the afternoons. I propose a club. It will meet at the farm on the third day of each ten, by Li Wan's leave. There is no subscription. There is no rank: whoever comes sits where there is room. There is one rule, and it is that nothing said in the club is owed to anyone afterwards. Tanchun."

Baoyu asked her, on the step of her court, why that rule and not another. "Because everything in this House is owed," said Tanchun. "I wanted to see how long a room could go without." She said it as another person might have said that she meant to try a rope. "You are not to tell Father it is a club. It is an afternoon."

Yingchun read the notice twice at her door, with her book under her arm, and told her maid that she would go if nobody minded. Her maid said nobody would. Yingchun said that was what she was afraid of, and read it a third time, as if the rule might have changed.

Baochai read it once, and her eyes went, as they always did, to the bottom of the sum. Paper, ink, tea; a stove; the afternoons. It came to almost nothing, which was what troubled her. A thing that cost almost nothing could not be paid for, and a thing that could not be paid for was a thing she did not know how to stand in. She folded the notice small and put it in her sleeve, and was seen to smile, and was not asked at what.

Daiyu read the last line standing on the step of the Lodge, in her two coats, and stood a good while after she had finished. Nothing said is owed. She had spent a year learning to the half-gram what everything cost, and she held the line up against the light of the morning like a coin from a country she had heard of and never seen.

In the east court Qingwen read it over Xiren's shoulder. "Whoever comes," she said. "It says whoever."

"It means whoever of the young ladies," said Xiren.

"It does not say that. It says no rank." Qingwen's hands were already in motion. "I should like to see what happens when it is read as it is written."

Baoyu did not read it at all. He was at the farm door by noon, asking Li Wan whether he might be the first to come.

The first meeting was on the thirteenth, in snow. It had begun in the night, fine and dry, and by afternoon the Garden was a white sheet laid over the shape of itself, and the water-wheel at the farm had stopped with a fringe of ice. Li Wan had lit the stove in the thatched house with her own wood, which she had cut herself in the tenth month with a small saw and an apologetic face, and put chestnuts in the ashes, gathered from the Garden's trees, which gave what they gave and for which nobody had thought to make a line. She had swept the floor twice. She had rehearsed what a hostess says, and found that she did not know it, and decided to say only that she hoped they would not mind the hens.

They came across the white ground one by one, with their sleeves over their hands, as people go to a place they have not been told they may go.

There were not enough chairs. There was a bed, a bench, a table, two stools, and a chair that had come with the thatch, and nobody had thought what to do about that. The question of who sits where is the first question of any House, and the House had trained them all to answer it before they were in the room. Baochai took a stool without being asked, which was the way she took everything. The one chair was left empty, by the stove, and everyone looked at it, as people look at a dish that has been put down in front of someone who has not yet come.

"Sit down, Yingchun," said Tanchun, who did not wait for these things. "You are the eldest."

Yingchun sat on the bench. "I would rather not take the chair," she said, "if no one wants me to." Tanchun looked at her a moment with an expression that was not unkind, and said, "Then it is Li Wan's," and Li Wan said that it was a hen-box, in the sweetest of voices, and sat on the floor by the stove with the poker across her knees, where she could reach the ashes. The chair stayed empty, with the fire on its one side.

Baoyu sat on the bed with his boots off. Daiyu sat on the other end of it, because it was warm, and for the first time in a month did not say that it was.

"The first business is the subject," said Tanchun. "I have thought of one. It is this: a thing that was given to you, that nobody entered." She said it in the voice of someone who had been up half the night with a figure. "Not what you were owed. What you were given. If it was on a roll, it does not count."

"Is it to be a verse?" said Yingchun.

"It is to be whatever you can make of it. It is to be short, because there is only the one fire."

They wrote on the backs of exercise sheets, with the brush that went round the room from hand to hand. It was very quiet. The stove ticked; a chestnut split in the ashes with a small sigh; outside the snow went on, and could be heard, in the way snow can, as a kind of attention.

Baoyu finished first, and read his out loud, since no one had told him not to.

The bamboo does not ask / what it costs the wind. / It turns over, it turns over, / and I am glad of it.

"That is a good one," said Li Wan, kindly, from the floor. "It is a very honest one." Baoyu, who had a mind to be pleased, was.

Baochai's was neat in the way a made bed is neat. She read it with her eyes down.

Rue by the step and thyme by the wall, / clipped level by a careful hand. / I cannot tell you what I was given. / I have been careful to give it back.

The last line went out into the room and stayed there, because it had not quite been meant to be as true as it was. "Very fine," said Tanchun. She said it carefully, as if she were holding something. Daiyu looked at the stove.

Yingchun, when she was asked, said she had written only two lines.

Whatever was left, I was given. / I found that it was enough.

Tanchun put her brush down. "It was not enough," she said. "You have been told that it was."

"Yes," said Yingchun. She looked at her hands. "I know."

Nobody said anything after that for a while. Then the chestnuts were raked out, hot and black and sweet, and one burned its way through a sleeve, and there was laughing, which, in that House, in that year, was a thing that happened with some caution.

It was then that Qingwen came in. She had been standing outside the door for some minutes, in the snow, with her arms wrapped round herself, being quick and bright and bad-tempered at nobody, and she came in now as though she had just that moment arrived. She stopped inside the door. Xiren, who had come after her to fetch her back and had stopped at the threshold, put a hand to her mouth.

"It says whoever," said Qingwen, to the room.

Nobody moved. It was the kind of silence in which a House finds out what it is. Baochai's face went perfectly smooth. Yingchun looked at the floor. And Tanchun, who had written the rule and was now looking at what it did, said, "It does. Sit where there is room."

Qingwen looked round. There was a bench full, a bed full, two stools, a floor with a widow on it. There was one empty chair, with the fire on its side, which everyone in the room knew the meaning of, and not one of them had touched. Qingwen walked across the farmhouse floor and sat down in it, and put her feet toward the stove, and took the brush from the hand that was holding it out to her, and wrote a verse in the time it takes to say it.

Nobody told me where to sit. / I chose. / It is the worst thing / I have ever been given.

"That," said Li Wan, from the floor, "is the most honest verse of the afternoon." Qingwen scowled, delighted. She sat in the chair until the light failed, with her feet to the fire, and it was the best afternoon of her life. She was asked about it once, years afterward, in a different room, by a person who had been told that a maid had sat in a chair; and what she said then is a thing for a later page.

Daiyu was the last. She did not read hers aloud; she gave the sheet to Li Wan, who held it a moment in her two hands and then, because the girl was looking at the floor, read it out in her own plain voice.

I said it was warm. / It was not warm. / Someone I did not ask / had made it so, / and I have not said thank you, / and I think that is how it is meant.

Nobody asked her who. They were all the children of a House that counted, and they could count. There had been a morning in the ninth when a basket of charcoal had come to each of thirty-eight rooms and been entered nowhere, and none of them had said so in a month. Tanchun, who could add, wrote nothing for a while.

Xichun, who was nine, had not written. She had come in late, with a stick of chalk in her fist, and found a patch of the table where the scrubbing had left it white, and drawn on that: the Garden, in the dusk, from the hill, as one sees it from the gate. Thirty-eight windows had a little yellow in them. Four had none, but she had drawn them lit.

"These four have nobody," said Tanchun, looking.

"Yes," said Xichun. "I know. I drew them lit anyway." She considered, with her head on one side, the way she did, and spoke rather as if to the chalk. "Somebody should be in them. I thought if I drew the light, somebody might come."

Nobody said anything. After a moment Li Wan put another stick of wood in the stove, though it was hot enough already, so that she should have something to do with her face.

"There is no prize," said Tanchun, at the end. "A prize comes from somebody's share. I have thought it through. But I should like them kept."

"They can be hung on the wall of the farm," said Li Wan. "It is a picture. It might as well have pictures in it."

So they were pinned up, unsigned, in a row between the door and the window where the thatch came down: five sheets of old exercise paper, and a sixth that Tanchun hung with its face to the wall and nobody turned, and a table with a chalk drawing on it. They were not copied. It was the rule that they should not be. Nothing in that room went into a book or onto a roll; it was made, and read, and left on a wall, and what it cost was a little paper and an afternoon, and nobody in the Garden was a thread the thinner for it.

It was the only place in the House that winter where nothing moved off anyone's share. I was on the bed, on the boy's chest, and I record it. I have heard a great deal in that House, and I have never heard anyone able to say that and mean it.

When they had gone out into the white, in ones and twos, with their sleeves down, Tanchun stayed behind to take the sheets down and put them up straight, because she could not leave a crooked thing. On the shelf by the door she found a flat parcel she had not put there. It was a quire of the good paper, the heavy cream kind, tied in plain grey string, and the corner of the top sheet had a small blind-stamp pressed into it that she knew: three coins on a cord, the mark of the Xues' trading house.

She stood with it in her hands. Then she went to the door. Baochai had not got far; she was at the bend of the path, in her white coat, with her maid, and she turned when Tanchun called, with the face she kept for being called.

"You have left something," said Tanchun.

"I have not," said Baochai.

"It has your family's mark."

"Then someone has made a mistake with it," said Baochai, pleasantly.

They looked at each other down the white path. It was a matter of a few paces and a quire of paper, and neither of them was a person who made much of such things. "Then I shall use it for the next notice," said Tanchun, "since it is nobody's," and Baochai said that seemed quite right; and the whole business was settled in a dozen words, and never mentioned again. It was a perfectly good allowance, made by each of them to the other so quietly that neither could have said who had made it.

Daiyu, who had been standing in the lee of the thatch with her hands in her sleeves, saw it all. She did not say anything. She went home across the snow, with her cough, to the Lodge, and wrote on a sheet of her own paper, for no one, three words, which she folded small and put in the book she was not reading: She pays hers.

Crabs

At the autumn reading the Table was altered, for the first time in seven years. The rule allowed it, and the Court's inspector, who had come on the first to watch it done, sat in the corner of the counting-room with his hat on his knee and heard each class lose its hair in turn: a hair off the first class, two off the second, a lock off the lowest. In a House where every bowl had already been spread it made little difference to the bowls and a great deal to the paper. Nobody looked up. When the last class had been read he nodded, because the Court likes to see a thing properly done, and went to his dinner. That evening Xifeng wrote the date in the black book, under a heading she had not used before, which was only the word Cut.

Xiangyun arrived in the second week of the ninth month, in a plain cart, and the Garden felt her come as a house feels weather. She was thirteen, of the Shi line, the Old Madam's great-niece: a tall loud girl with a laugh that went off like a dropped tray and a way of talking so fast that her sentences reached their ends before their middles. She hugged the Old Madam, ate three bowls of congee, called Baoyu by a name that only she used, and was taken to the south court, where Baochai had a second bed made up before anyone had thought to ask.

At her first supper she set down her spoon and looked into her bowl. "Is it thin here too?" she said, with interest. "At home I thought it was only us."

The table was quiet for the length of a breath. "It is the season, child," said the Old Madam, who had a way of saying the season that closed a subject like a lid. "Oh," said Xiangyun, and went on eating. She was the only person in the House that autumn to say the thing aloud, and she said it as a piece of news, so that it was nobody's fault.

She was a guest in the Garden on the Old Madam's share, added by spreading, for one month in every autumn, and she knew to the day how long that was. The rest of the year she lived with her uncle's wife, in a House whose Charter had thinned in exactly the manner of Rong's and had no Old Madam to make up for it. There she was kept, as the phrase has it, on her work: the mending of the household's fine things, done at night by candle, in the hours that the mending-room would have given her if the House had had hours to give. Her left forefinger had a ring of small red pricks on it, and the cuff of her right sleeve was worn through and darned and worn through again. She laughed about it. "I owe them the board," she said. "It's only fair."

Baochai saw the finger on the first night. She said nothing. She said it so cleverly that Yinger, her maid, who had been with her six years, took a moment to see that anything had been said.

The club had met nine times by then. The farmhouse wall had forty-odd sheets on it, unsigned, beside the chalk-drawn table, and the thatch had been mended where the snow had got in. The empty chair still stood by the stove, and was sat in by whoever came late and bold enough, which was mostly Qingwen, and once, memorably, Baoyu's old nurse. Xiangyun went to her first meeting on the thirteenth and read every sheet on the wall, standing, with her mouth slightly open.

"But whose are they?" she said.

"Nobody's," said Tanchun. "That is the rule."

"That is the best rule I ever heard," said Xiangyun, and sat down in the chair, quite naturally, being a guest and knowing no better; and the room let her.

At the end, while the sheets were being passed round, she stood up with her cup in her hand. "I want to give a party," she said. "At the next meeting. Crabs."

Everyone looked at her.

"Hosting is not in the rules," said Tanchun, carefully.

"It is in mine. I have never given a party in my life. I have been to eleven." Xiangyun's face was shining. "I have my Pocket for the month, a whole string. I shall do it properly."

A string, in the autumn, bought perhaps four crabs. Nobody said so. Li Wan looked at the stove, and Yingchun at her hands, and Tanchun at the ceiling; and Baochai, who was good at sums and at silences, said that she thought it a delightful idea, and that she would help to plan it, since Xiangyun was in her court and would only be in the way otherwise.

That night in the south court, with one candle between the two beds, Baochai wrote it out on the back of a sheet of her own paper, in her neat, reasonable hand, the way one writes out a thing that is already settled. "Forty crabs, say, for the club and the Old Madam. Our shop has a boatload that came in too late for the market. They are good now. In three days they will not be. We should be obliged to anyone who would take them off our hands for a string, and glad of it."

Xiangyun sat up in bed with her hair down. "A string for forty?"

"They will have gone off in three days," said Baochai. "It is better that someone eat them than that they go in the river. It is the same as selling. Better, really; we get the string."

"It is not fair to your shop."

"It is perfectly fair. A thing worth nothing tomorrow is worth a string today." She said it in the voice of her family's trade, which was a fine voice, and truthful in every word, so that the whole was a lie only in the way it was arranged. Yinger, filling the water-jug in the corner, stopped with her back turned. The crabs were fresh. They would be fresh for ten days. They had cost the shop eleven strings, and Baochai had already entered ten of them in her own small book as hers.

Xiangyun looked at the candle. "I do not like being given things," she said.

"You are not. You are buying."

"With a string."

"With a string and an hour." Baochai said it lightly, as an afterthought. "You have an hour of the mending-room in your guest allowance that you never use; you are as strong as a horse. The string covers the crabs. The hour covers the carting. A bargain is not struck unless both sides are out something. It is the first thing my father taught us."

Xiangyun laughed, and pushed back her hair. "That is a hard bargain, Baochai."

"I am a merchant's daughter."

It was an excellent bargain, and exactly even, and entirely false, and Xiangyun went to sleep inside it as in a warm bed. Baochai lay a long time awake. She had made a gift into a trade so that it could be accepted, and she meant to make the trade into a gift again so that it could be passed on. It was a thing she did often and never mentioned, and it is why so many people in that House were warmer than they knew.

The party was on the twenty-third, in the pavilion over the water, with the pond covered in fallen leaves and the chrysanthemums from the farm set along the rail. Li Wan had grown them, the first thing the farm had ever produced that was only for looking at, and had apologised for them in advance. The Old Madam was carried out in a chair with a rug on her knees. The crabs came up from the Garden kitchen in steaming heaps on green platters, red as lacquer, with vinegar and ginger and hot yellow wine, and the pavilion smelled of autumn and money.

A crab is eaten by rank, as everything is, and the House knew the order without being taught: the Old Madam had two, the young had one each, and the maids stood at the foot of the pavilion stairs, where a second, smaller table had been set, and shared a crab between two. The shells came down the steps in order of size, like the generations. There were thirty-one at the party and forty crabs. Xiangyun, who could not count and did not mean to be seen to try, said it was exactly the right number. Baochai, who could count, said the shop had sent over nine more, with its compliments, since a boat cannot be counted to the shell; and the nine went down the back stairs to the kitchen, to the girls who had boiled the water, and Xiaohong, who had carried it, ate hers in a corner and counted its legs.

Xifeng came late, as a person comes who is needed elsewhere, and was brilliant. She sat by the Old Madam's elbow and peeled her crab with a tiny silver pick, and told her a story about a steward and a goose that made the old woman laugh till she had to put her cup down. She ate nothing herself. She said she had had hers in the kitchen. Once, when she thought the table was looking at the crabs, she pressed the heel of her hand against her side, below the ribs, and took it away again. Pinger, who had stood next to her in the kitchen, did not say that she hadn't.

Daiyu was not allowed crab. The physician had forbidden it, as cold. She sat at the end of the table with a cup of hot ginger tea, and Baoyu sat beside her and peeled his own crab and, when he thought nobody was looking, put the sweetest of the meat in her saucer. She ate one mouthful of it, slowly, and set the cup down. "It is very good," she said. "It is not for me."

Xiangyun was going round the table with a platter, pink to the ears, giving everyone more than they wanted. "A string," she said, to Daiyu. "Forty crabs for a string. Baochai said they would have gone off in three days."

"Then you must have a very kind shop," said Daiyu.

"Oh, merchants do not do kind," said Xiangyun, happily. "They do fair."

Daiyu looked at her tea. Down the table Baochai was picking a leg-joint with her silver pick, and she did not look up.

Afterwards, because there was always a verse, Xiangyun wrote hers standing up, with a crab-pick in her other hand, in the time it takes to eat a leg.

I gave a party, I gave a party! / The crabs were red and the pond was gold. / Nobody owes me, I owe nobody, / and that, I think, is what being rich is.

Baochai read it over her shoulder and said that it was very fine, in a voice so perfectly even that Tanchun, who was sitting opposite, put down her cup.

When the shells were cleared, the Old Madam sat a while with her hands in her lap, looking at the pond. "It was a very good crab," she said at last. "You must tell your uncle's wife what a price you got."

"I will!" said Xiangyun.

The Old Madam said nothing more. She picked up the second crab that she had been given, which she had not touched, and put it without a word on Baochai's plate. Baochai looked at it. For the length of one breath her smile was late; it arrived, as it always did, perfectly, but it was late, and the Old Madam, who had noticed everything in that House for fifty years, noticed that too, and turned her face to the water.

The hour was signed over at the mending-room counter the next morning, in Xiangyun's large round hand, on a slip. Baochai did not keep it. She sent it to Pinger by Yinger, folded small, with a line in the margin that said it was for the water-carrier at the north stair, from someone who did not want to be named. Pinger, who had been remembering what that child was owed and since when, read it twice, and put it in her sleeve, and for the first time in a month carried a debt that was going the other way.

Xiaohong went on the third day. She had never been in the mending-room. It was a long warm room with a lamp at either end and benches along the wall, where the House's bodies were seen to, a hand's width at a time, by grey Menders with large quiet hands; the first class came here every week, the second every fortnight, and the girls who carried water not at all. She sat on the edge of a bench with her feet together so that the hole in her left shoe should not show, and did not know what to do with her hands.

The Mender who took her was a broad woman of sixty, with a face like bread. She put her thumbs on the girl's shoulders, and then she stopped. "How old are you?" she said.

"Twelve."

"These are the shoulders of a woman of thirty," said the Mender. She said it quite gently, as one says what is on a bill. "Who has been carrying what?"

Xiaohong did not answer. The thumbs began, slow and exact, to work down the cords of her neck, and she sat quite still with her eyes on the lamp, and after a while her face did something that she did not allow it to do in the passage, and the Mender, who had seen it ten thousand times, looked at the wall.

"Who paid for this hour?" the Mender asked, at the end.

"Nobody told me."

"Then somebody has been very careful," said the Mender, and wrote something in her book.

Xiaohong went out into the passage with her shoulders a hand's width lower than they had been and counted the hour to the minute, as the sand had run, and added it to the other things that she was counting. She still did not know what the sum was for. It had cost a string, and an hour, and eleven strings of crabs, and the faint lowering of a merchant's profit in a town a long way off; and it had come out, in one far room, as a girl of twelve with her shoulders loosened. Baochai never saw it. That was the point of it.

Granny Liu

Granny Liu came in the second week of the tenth month, to the back gate, on foot, with a grandson of six on one hand and a basket the size of a sheep on her back.

She was of the unchartered, who live on the far side of the river from the Houses and keep each other without a book. They have no Table and no Pocket and no mending-room; the Menders cross to them in the lean months and are fed by turns, a house to a day, and nobody can say afterwards who fed whom. She was seventy-one. She was small and broad and brown as a loaf, with a face in which every wrinkle seemed to have been put there by a different joke, and she came to the gate of the greatest House she had ever stood before in the manner of a woman who has already decided that she will be laughed at and has priced it.

The gatekeeper asked her business. "I have come to see Madam Lian," said Granny Liu, "who is my cousin's cousin, if you go back far enough, and I will tell you how far if you have an hour." He had not an hour. He sent for Pinger, who came down the lane with her sleeves pushed up and her face carefully empty, and looked at the old woman for exactly as long as it takes to see that nothing on her was going to ask for anything it could not name.

"She is in the counting-room," said Pinger. "Come this way. Mind the step. There are a great many steps."

"I have counted them," said Granny Liu. "Forty-one, at the gate alone. I have not been up a stair since my husband died, and I am going to enjoy every one."

In the counting-room Xifeng was at the long table with a grey Court slip under her hand, and she looked up with the face that she put on for people she needed to be pleasant to, and then did not need it. She had been awake since five. She had a pain under her ribs that came and went, and she had just done, for the second time that morning, the sum that came to a hundred and eighty-seven, and found it no smaller. Here was an old woman in a brown coat, smelling of woodsmoke and straw, laying a basket on the floor as if it were an egg.

"Dried gourd," said Granny Liu, "and a squash, and some of the small sweet melons, which are not much, but they are ours. And a goose in the spring, which I have not got yet." She considered. "I shall have the goose by the time I am back."

"Sit down," said Xifeng, and found, to her surprise, that she meant it.

The debt was an old one, and not one that either House had entered. Forty winters ago, in a lean year, Xifeng's grandfather had kept the mother of Granny Liu's husband in the back kitchen of his own House for the length of one frost, when her own village could not; and since it had not been written down, it had never been reckoned, and since it had never been reckoned, neither side could close it. It had sat in the unchartered country for forty years as a kind of low warmth. Granny Liu told it without once saying she was owed, which was how Xifeng knew how much.

"The river has had two of our fields," she said. "And the other has gone to my son-in-law's brother, who is a good man and cannot count. We shall eat. We shall be thin by the spring. I thought: I will go and see whether there is one person, in the greatest House I have ever heard of, who is still a person. And here you are."

Xifeng laughed. It was the low laugh again, the surprised one. She opened the drawer and took out thirty strings, tied with red thread, and counted them out on the table in front of the old woman in a row, and Pinger, seeing the red thread, looked at the table and did not look up. It was the same thread. It had been the same thread on every Pocket that had gone out from that room, and on the forty strings, in the tenth month of last year, that had gone out by the side door to Gu. Xifeng knew whose strings they were. She said, "That is for the winter." She said it as if it were a plain fact, and it was.

Granny Liu counted. Her lips moved; she was not a woman who could write, and her counting was exact to the grain. She pushed five strings back across the table.

"That is too much," she said.

"It is thirty."

"It is twenty-five that my village can bear to owe. Five more would be a stone round my neck." She said it kindly, as one corrects a child's grip. "A thing you cannot pay back in the spring is not a gift, madam. It is a lien. I will take twenty-five, and the goose, and eggs by the spring, to the value, and then it is finished, and we can be fond of each other like decent people."

Xifeng looked at the five strings. In all the years she had been in that room she had never had a person push money back across that table. She had been given a great deal and had taken all of it; she had lent a great deal and had been thanked. She did not know what to do with her hands.

"Pinger," she said at last. "Put them away."

There was a small cry from the inner room. Pinger went and came back with a child on her arm, a girl of a year and a few months, in a yellow jacket, with a thin fretful face and a great deal of black hair. This was Qiaojie, who had been born in the seventh month of the year before, and had not got her weight; and Granny Liu, who had raised nine children and buried three and could not be shown a baby without looking at its wrists, held out both arms.

The grandson, who had been hiding in the folds of the brown coat, came out sideways with a small sweet gourd from the basket and held it up without a word. The baby took it in both fists and stopped crying, for the first time that morning. "She has not been quiet since the autumn," said Pinger.

Granny Liu held the child as one holds a bowl that is not quite full. "She is light," she said.

"The physician says she will grow," said Xifeng.

"The physician has not had her on his arm." Granny Liu shifted her gently. "She is a good child. She wants only to be set down where someone is, and nobody has had the time. It is no fault. Madam, if the House ever gets too hot for her, she can come." She stopped, and looked at Xifeng's face, and said the rest plainly. "We have a bed. It is by the stove. We do not write it down."

"I will think about it," said Xifeng.

She heard the words as they left her. They were the words of that House, the polite shut-door words, and she had said them to a great many people for a great many reasons. Granny Liu did not smile. She had been listening to that House's phrases for the whole of an hour and had picked up the grammar as a farmer picks up the weather.

"Don't think about it," she said. "That is the House's way of saying never; I have learned that this morning. Remember it. That is all. You need not do anything. Only remember there is a bed."

From the pocket of her coat she took a twist of paper, and put it into Xifeng's hand. It was a dozen red dates, dried, wrinkled and dark. "From my own tree," she said. "Three a day. You are the colour of rice-water, madam. Don't tell the physician; he will charge."

Xifeng ate three that night, in the counting-room, with the black book open at her elbow. They were sour and sweet at once and they tasted of the other side of the river. She ate three the next day, and the next. There were twelve; they lasted four days, and she did not enter them.

The Old Madam heard of the visitor from three different people before noon and sent for her at once. It was the first time in a month that she had asked for anything.

They put Granny Liu in the pavilion over the water, in a cushioned chair she could not find the bottom of, and she sat in it with her feet not touching the floor and her grandson clutching her skirt, and she was a great success. She told the Old Madam how many hens she had and what each was called. She described a storm. She explained, with gestures, how a woman who did not know she was pregnant had once given birth in a turnip field and had been very annoyed. The Old Madam, who had been listening to the quiet speech of her own House for a long time, laughed until she had to put down her tea, and the girls laughed because she did.

"And in the winter?" said the Old Madam, when she could. "How do you manage in the winter?"

"By turns, my lady," said Granny Liu. "Every house takes the old and the sick for a day. The Menders come in the lean months, and they are fed by turns too. Nobody writes it. If you wrote it, somebody would have to be paid to read it."

"And if one takes more than a turn?"

"Then the village knows, and says nothing, and the next winter that one is given a turn a little shorter. That is all. It has not failed in my time."

"That is a great deal of trust."

"It is not trust, my lady. It is only that everyone is in everyone's mouth. You cannot hide in a village." She said it comfortably, and reached for a sweet.

There was a pause in the pavilion, of the kind that comes when a thing has been said that nobody wants to be the first to be moved by. It was Xiangyun, who could not bear a silence, who broke it. "She needs flowers!" she cried, and the girls were off.

They dressed her in chrysanthemums. It was Xiangyun's idea, and Baoyu's; they stuck the autumn flowers into her white hair until she looked like a haystack that had been to a wedding, and they gave her yellow wine in a cup the size of a thimble, and she drank it and said it was the nearest she had come to heaven and she hoped it was not the last. "I was a beauty once," she said, stoutly. "There were three men at my door." The pavilion shook. Yingchun laughed behind her hand. Tanchun, who did not often, put her head on the table.

When the laughing had died down, Granny Liu looked out of the pavilion at the water, and the fine rocks, and the farm with its four hens. "In my village this would be four fields and a pond," she said, "and three families would eat from it. Here it is for looking at. It is very handsome." She said it as she might have said it was going to rain. The Old Madam stopped laughing, for about a breath, and Tanchun lifted her head and looked at the old woman with a new attention; and then somebody poured more wine.

Daiyu did not laugh. She sat at the end, with her cup of ginger tea, watching with an expression that did not move, and when the others had gone out into the garden with the old woman to see the lake, she stayed in her place.

She found Granny Liu again at dusk, at the water-steps, alone, taking the flowers out of her hair one by one and putting them in the pocket of her coat. The grandson was asleep on a bench. The old woman did not look round.

"You did not laugh, miss," she said.

"No."

"That is all right. Somebody ought not to." She took out the last chrysanthemum and looked at it. "I know what I was doing in there. They feed me for it, and they give me a cart of rice and cloth when I go, and I make them laugh in the way they like to be made to. It is an honest trade. I take their laughing and they take my dignity, and I have a great deal of dignity and no use for it, and you may be sure I have never been paid so well for anything."

Daiyu stood still. She had never in her life been spoken to by anyone who was both so much poorer and so little afraid. "Does it cost you?" she said.

"It costs me what it costs. I do not pretend otherwise. The ones who do not laugh are the ones who see it, and I like those best, miss. They never make me feel I am being given anything. That is the worst, when they give." She pulled a rush from the edge of the pond, and her old hands moved over it, quick, folding, and in a moment she held out a small green grasshopper. It had a body and four legs and long, absurd feelers, and it sat in the palm of her hand as if it might spring. "It is worth nothing," she said. "There. Now I have not given you a thing. It is only a grasshopper."

Daiyu took it. She stood a long time with it on her palm at the water-steps, while the old woman gathered her sleeping grandson and went up the stairs, counting them.

She left in the morning with a cartload that the House had insisted on: rice, cloth, a coat, a box of sweets, the Old Madam's own gift of a roll of silk. Xifeng watched her from the counting-room window as she went down the lane, small and straight, with her basket on her back. Halfway to the gate she stopped, took a length of cloth from the cart, and gave it to the gatekeeper's wife; then another, to a girl at the well. By the time she reached the street the cart was lighter by a third. Granny Liu was not a person who could carry a gift for long.

"She owes us twenty-five strings and a goose," said Pinger, at the window.

"Yes," said Xifeng. She was looking at the gate. "I should like very much to see the goose."

In the Lodge of Thin Green that night a girl in two coats set a grasshopper of green rush on the sill, where the lamp could catch it, and did not say whose it was, and went to bed. In the morning it was still there. She had half expected it to have to be paid for.