Page:A history of Chinese literature - Giles.djvu/383

 bad dream. But she had something worse than that. She had a bad illness to follow ; and strange to say, Pao-yii was laid up at the same time. The doctor came and felt her pulse both pulses, in fact and shook his head, and drank a cup of tea, and said that Tai-yii's vital principle wanted nourishment, which it would get out of a prescription he then and there wrote down. As to Pao-yii, he was simply suffering from a fit of temporary indigestion.

So Tai-yii got better, and Pao-yii recovered his spirits. His father had returned home, and he was once more obliged to make some show of work, and consequently had fewer hours to spend in the society of his cousin. He was now a young man, and the question of his marriage began to occupy a foremost place in the minds of his parents and grandmother. Several names were proposed, one especially by his father ; but it was finally agreed that it was unnecessary to go far afield to secure a fitting bride. It was merely a choice between the two charming young ladies who had already shared so much in his daily life. But the difficulty lay precisely there. Where each was perfection it became invidious to choose. In another famous Chinese novel, already described, a similar difficulty is got over in this way the hero marries both. Here, however, the family elders were distracted by rival claims. By their gentle, winning manners, Pao-ch'ai and Tai-yii had made themselves equally be- loved by all the inmates of these two noble houses, from the venerable grandmother down to the meanest slave-girl. Their beauty was of different styles, but at the bar of man's opinion each would probably have gained an equal number of votes. Tai-yii was un- doubtedly the cleverer of the two, but Pao-ch'ai had

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