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

trusted to it. Now Old Gentleman was saying she would be hated for it.
    “Because,” Old Gentleman said without sign of emotion in his face or voice, “the first love in a man’s heart is love of self. Heaven put that love first in order that man would want to live, whatever his sorrows. Now, when self-love is wounded, no other love can survive, because when self-love is too much wounded, the self is willing to die, and that is against Heaven.”
    “Will my lord hate me, then?” she had asked again.
    Without his putting it into words, it was clear to her that Old Gentleman knew that she was more intelligent than his son, and he was warning her.
    “My child,” Old Gentleman said, “there is no man who can endure woman’s greater wisdom if she lives in his house and sleeps in his bed. He may say he worships at her shrine, but worship is dry fare for daily life. A man cannot make of his house a temple, nor take a goddess for his wife. He is not strong enough.”
    “Our Father, had I not better read the wicked books?” she had asked so suddenly that Old Gentleman had started. She was surprised and then even a little shocked to see a certain diffidence in his eyes. He had been looking at her with his usual mild directness. Now to evade her he turned to the teapot on the table.
    She had stepped forward. “Let me pour it for you,” she had said and did so. He sipped his tea for a moment before he answered. Then he said, still not looking at her, “Child, you will not understand me, perhaps. But believe me without understanding. It is better that you do not read these books. Men love women when they are not too knowing. You are so wise already, so very wise for your youth. You do not need these books. Apply your own mind, now fresh and pure, to the task of making my son happy. Learn love at the source, my child, not out of books.”
    For a moment it had seemed to her that this was no answer at all. Then, standing there by the table, leaning on her hands as she looked at him, she perceived that he was the wisest soul in all the world, and that until her wisdom matched his she had better believe him.
    “I will obey you, my father,” she had said, and so she had obeyed him for twenty years and more.
    But today, alone in this room where they had once been, sitting in the chair which had once been only his, it seemed to her that now her wisdom did match his and her obedience had been fulfilled. She was free of Old Gentleman, too, at last.
    So she rose and went, her heart beating strangely, toward the forbidden books. She knew the names of some of them, the names of novels and stories which she had always been taught the true scholar never reads because they are beneath him. Only the low and the coarse, who cannot bear the high ether of spirit and thought, can be allowed the diversion of such books. Yet all men read them, yes, even the scholars, too! Old Gentleman himself had read them and he had allowed his son to read them, knowing that if he did not, his son would read them anyway.
    “What all men know,” Madame Wu now asked herself, “ought not a woman to know?”
    She chose a book at random. It was a long book. Many thin volumes lay in the clothbound box. The name of the book she had heard. Among the many women in a house as large as her mother’s and as large as the Wu house, there were always some who were coarse in their talk. The story of Hsi Men Ch’ing and his six wives all had heard in one way or another. Plum Flower in a Vase of Gold —the letters were here delicately brushed on the satin cover of this first volume.
    “The books look often read,” she thought and smiled with a fleeting bitter mirth. Generations of men of the Wu house had read them, doubtless, but perhaps she was the first woman who had ever held them in her hand.
    She took them to the table and looked first at the pictures. An artist had drawn them. There was profound art in the sensuous lines. She studied especially the face of Hsi Men