Pavilion of Women: A Novel of Life in the Women's Quarters by Pearl S. Buck

babbled, and bowing and babbling she hurried away on her feet that had been badly bound in her childhood and now were like thick stumps.
    Almost immediately Ying came into the room with fresh tea. She did not speak, and Madame Wu did not. She watched in silence while Ying wiped the table and the chair where the old woman had sat and took up the tea bowl she had used as though it were a piece of filth. When she was about to leave with this bowl Madame Wu spoke.
    “Tonight about twilight a young woman will come to the gate.”
    Ying stood motionless, listening, the dirty bowl between her thumb and finger.
    “Bring her straight to me,” Madame Wu directed, “and put up a little bamboo bed for her here in this room.”
    “Yes, Lady,” Ying muttered. Her voice choked in her throat and she hurried away.
    The day moved on toward the night. It was Madame Wu’s habit to retire to her bedroom after her noon meal and rest for an hour. But on this day when she went into the big shadowy bedroom she found that she could neither sleep nor rest. It was not that the room was still strange to her. Indeed, she had already come to feel so at home in the rooms that she wondered at her own comfort in them. Her restlessness was not a matter of the room but of her inner self.
    “I will not lie down today,” she said to Ying.
    Ying stared at her with foreboding in her faithful eyes. “You had better sleep this afternoon, Lady,” she said. “I doubt you sleep well tonight with a stranger here in our house.”
    “I seem to need no sleep,” Madame Wu said. At the sight of Ying’s foreboding her mood changed. She felt mischievous and willful. She put out her hand and gave Ying a soft touch on the arm that was half a push. “Go—leave me, Ying,” she commanded. “I will find a book—I will amuse myself.”
    “As you choose,” Ying replied, and with unusual abruptness she turned and left Madame Wu standing in the middle of the room. But Madame Wu did not notice her. She stood, her finger on her delicate lip, half smiling. Then she gave a quick nod and moved across the room toward the library. Her footfall fitted into the hollowed stone before the door where before her scores of feet now dead had fitted too.
    “But they were all men,” she thought, still half smiling, feeling that hollow under her foot.
    She felt free and bold as she had never felt in her life before. Not a soul was here to see what she did. She belonged wholly to herself for this hour. Well, then, the time had come for her to read one of the forbidden books.
    Old Gentleman had never made it a secret from her where these books were on the shelves. Indeed, after he had discovered that she could read and write, he had led her one day into the library and himself had showed her the shelf where they lay, packet by packet, in their blue cotton covers. “These books, my child,” he had said to her in his grave way, “these books are not for you.”
    “Because I am a woman?” she had asked.
    He had nodded. Then he had added, “But also I did not allow my son to read them until he was fifteen and past childhood.”
    “Has my lord read them all?” she had then inquired.
    Old Gentleman had looked embarrassed. “I suppose he has,” he said. “I have never asked, but I suppose all young men read them. That is why I have them here. I told my son, ‘If you must read these books, wait until you are fifteen and read them here in my own library and not slyly hidden in your schoolbooks.’ ”
    She had then put another of her clear questions to him. “Our Father, do you think my mind will never be beyond that of my lord’s at fifteen?”
    He had been further embarrassed at this question. But he was an honest old man, although a scholar, and he wrinkled his high pale yellow brow.
    “Your mind is an excellent one for a woman,” he had said at last. “I would even say, my daughter, that had your brains been inside the skull of a man, you could have sat for the Imperial