my heart begins to bleed within me."

"Quite so! Quite so!" observed Hsi Jen, clapping her hands, after
listening to her throughout. "It isn't strange then if she let me have
the ten butterfly knots I asked her to tie for me only after ever so
many days, and if she said that they were coarsely done, but that I
should make the best of them and use them elsewhere, and that if I
wanted any nice ones, I should wait until by and bye when she came to
stay here, when she would work some neatly for me. What you've told me
now reminds me that, as she had found it difficult to find an excuse
when we appealed to her, she must have had to slave away, who knows how
much, till the third watch in the middle of the night. What a stupid
thing I was! Had I known this sooner, I would never have told her a word
about it."

"Last time;" continued Pao-ch'ai, "she told me that when she was at home
she had ample to do, that she kept busy as late as the third watch, and
that, if she did the slightest stitch of work for any other people, the
various ladies, belonging to her family, did not like it."

"But as it happens," explained Hsi Jen, "that mulish-minded and
perverse-tempered young master of ours won't allow the least bit of
needlework, no matter whether small or large, to be made by those
persons employed to do sewing in the household. And as for me, I have no
time to turn my attention to all these things."

"Why mind him?" laughed Pao-ch'ai. "Simply ask some one to do the work
and finish."

"How could one bamboozle him?" resumed Hsi Jen. "Why, he'll promptly