The Duke, who was a sturdily built man of small stature, with a good humoured round face and a thin high bridged nose in the middle of it to prove the aristocracy which his house and his clothes belied, fanned himself furiously for a moment, pulled up his sleeves with an elaborate gesture and rising, took down a thrush in its bamboo cage from the open door way. He yawned as he closed his fan with a click and buttoned up his throat.
"Ruined and devoured by fat, lazy, worthless women" he pronounced sententiously to the courtyard or the open sky. "Here am I with a ricsha coolie's income buying paint and powder, gee-gaws for the hair, and satin slippers, for' two daughters who have grown old and fat because they were too good for any man I could find em, and two others who were so dog-faced ugly that no one would have em—and an old woman who ought to be planting evergreens around her burial plot instead of trying to deck herself out like a tumble-bug at a fair. Here we are, houses gone, land gone, position gone, horses gone, everything but the pots and pans in the pawnshop; and I keep up a show of loveliness that isn't even negotiable. If I were a Chinese with the average run of daughters I could sell out and start in business as a pedlar of melon seeds and peanuts. but I'm a Manchu Duke, forsooth, with a brood of beauties to whom even the ashman never raises his eyes!''
The din of vituperation which followed the Duke of Chan into his courtyard for a moment drowned even the persistent clamour of the bill collector and the rabble in the street; but with recovered poise and serenity the noble gentleman carried his bird cage across the court, summoned a tattered old servant and was let out of a side gate into an adjacent alleyway. He turned many corners, threaded many short narrow streets, and in a_ few minutes trudged out into the middle of the broad highway which runs north and south through the West City of Peking, only a few hundred yards north of the Hsun-chih Men. He looked to his left and his right, then turned and marched briskly to the great gate of the city. only slackening his pace a little in the cool of the massive arch.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.