Free A House Divided by Pearl S. Buck

flowered satin-covered chairs and tables, and the bright silks of women’s clothes and the vermilion of their painted lips, so that when Yuan entered the room where all his kin folk were, he felt a glitter there which was too much for beauty.
    Now his uncle rose, his hands lifting his huge belly from his knees, and from it his brocaded robes hung down like curtains, and he gasped out to greet his guests, “Well, sister-in-law, and my brother’s son, and Ai-lan! Well, eh, this Yuan is a great tall black lad, too, like his father—not like, no, I swear—gentler than a tiger somewhat, perhaps—”
    He laughed his rolling gasping laugh and heaved himself into seat again, and his lady rose and Yuan looking sidewise saw her a neat, grey-faced lady, very plain and proper in her black satin coat and skirt, her hands crossed into her sleeves, and her little bound feet holding her unsteadily. She gave greeting to them, and she said, “I hope I see you well, sister-in-law, and brother’s son. Ai-lan, you are grown thin—too thin. These maids nowadays will starve themselves and wear their little straight-cut dresses that are bold as men’s robes. Pray sit down, sister—”
    Near her stood a woman Yuan did not know at all, a woman with a scrubbed rosy face, her skin shining with soapy washing and her hair drawn straight from her brow in a country fashion, and her eyes very bright but not too wise. No one thought to say this woman’s name, and Yuan did not know if she were a servant or not, until his lady mother said a kind greeting to her and from it Yuan knew this was his uncle’s concubine. He moved his head a little then and the woman blushed and bowed as country women will, her hands folded in her sleeves, but she said nothing.
    Then when greetings were all given, the cousins called out to Yuan to come and drink his tea aside in another room with them, and he and Ai-lan did, glad to be free of their elders. And Yuan sat silently and heard the chatter of those who know each other well, to whom only he was stranger, though he was their cousin.
    Very well he marked them one by one, his eldest cousin not young any more, not slender either, but his belly growing as his father’s did. He was half foreign in his dark woolen foreign garb, and his pale face was handsome still, his soft hands smooth-fleshed, and his wandering restless glance lingered over-long even on his girl cousin, so that his pretty sharp-voiced wife recalled him with a little sneer she slipped sidewise into something else she said. And there was Sheng the poet, his second cousin, his hair straight and long about his face, his fingers long and pale and delicate, his face studied in its look of smiling meditation. Only the young third cousin was not smooth in his looks and ways. He was a lad of sixteen years or so, clad in a common school uniform of grey, buttoned to the neck, and his face was not beautiful at all, shaped anyhow and pimpled, and his hands were angular and loose and hung too long from out his sleeves. He only said nothing while the others chattered, but he sat eating peanuts from a dish nearby, eating hungrily and yet with such a look of young gloom upon his face that one would say he ate them against his will entirely.
    About the room and among the feet of all of them ran younger children, a lad or two of ten and eight, two little girls, and there was a screaming two-year-old looped in a band of cloth held by a serving woman, and a babe in arms suckling at the breast of a wet nurse. These were the children of Yuan’s uncle’s concubine, and of his elder cousins, but Yuan was shy of children and he let them be.
    At first the talk was among them all and Yuan sat silently, for while they bade him eat as he would from varied sweetmeats that stood near in dishes on small tables, and while his elder cousin’s wife called to a serving maid to pour out tea, they forgot him seemingly, and paid no heed to courtesies in which he had been taught. So he