I
found it necessary to talk to Li-ti's nurse, and I told her many things it
were good for her to know. I warned her that if she did not wish to
revisit her home province she must still her tongue. Things were better
for a time, but they commenced again, and I called her to my
courtyard and said to her, "The sheaves of rice have been beaten
across the wood for the last time. You must go." Li-ti was
inconsolable, but I was firm. Such quarrels are not becoming when we
are so many beneath one rooftree.

The servant went away, but she claimed her servant's right of reviling
us within our gate. She lay beneath our outer archway for three long
hours and called down curses upon the Liu family. One could not get
away from the sound of the enumeration of the faults and vices of thy
illustrious ancestors even behind closed doors. I did not know, my
husband, that history claimed so many men of action by the name of
Liu. It pleased me to think thou mayest claim so long a lineage, as
she went back to the dynasty of Ming and brought forth from his grave
each poor man and woman and told us of-- not his virtues. I should
have been more indignant, perhaps, if I had not heard o'ermuch the
wonders of thy family tree. I was impressed by the amount of
knowledge acquired by the family of Li-ti. They must have searched
the chronicles which evidently recorded only the unworthy acts of thy
men-folk in the past. I hope that I will forget what I have heard, as
some time when I am trying to escape from thine ancestors the
tongue might become unruly.

At the end of three hours the woman was faint and very ill. I had one
of the servants take her down to the boat, and sent a man home with
her, bearing a letter saying she was sickening for home faces. She is
old, and I did not want her to end her days in disgrace and shame.

But thine Honourable Mother! Thine Honourable Mother! Art thou not
glad that thou art in a far-off country? She went from courtyard to
courtyard, and for a time I fully expected she would send to the
Yamen for the soldiers; then she realised the woman was within her
right, and so restrained her-self. It nearly caused her death, as thou
knowest thine Honourable Mother has not long practised the virtue of
restraint, especially of the tongue. She was finally overcome taken to
her chamber, and we brought her tea and heated wine, and tried in all
our ways to make her forget the great humiliation. As she became no
better, we sent fo