and evil-tempered person who was connected with Quen's father
in matters of commerce expressed his fixed determination that the most
deserving and enlightened of his friend's sons should enter into a
marriage agreement with his daughter, there was no manner of hesitation
among those concerned, who admitted without any questioning between
themselves that Quen was undeniably the one referred to.

"Though naturally not possessing an insignificant intellect, a
continuous habit, together with a most irreproachable sense of filial
duty, subdued within Quen's internal organs whatever reluctance he might
have otherwise displayed in the matter, so that as courteously as was
necessary he presented to the undoubtedly very ordinary and slow-witted
maiden in question the gifts of irretrievable intention, and honourably
carried out his spoken and written words towards her.

"For a period of years the circumstances of the various persons did not
in any degree change, Quen in the meantime becoming more pure-souled
and inward-seeing with each moon-change, after the manner of the sublime
Lien-ti, who studied to maintain an unmoved endurance in all varieties
of events by placing his body to a greater extent each day in a vessel
of boiling liquid. Nevertheless, the good and charitable deities to
whom Quen unceasingly sacrificed were not altogether unmindful of his
virtues; for a son was born, and an evil disease which arose from a most
undignified display of uncontrollable emotion on her part ended in his
wife being deposited with becoming ceremony in the Family Temple.

"Upon a certain evening, when Quen sat in his inner chamber deliberating
upon the really beneficent yet somewhat inexplicable arrangement of the
all-seeing ones to whom he was very amiably disposed in consequence of
the unwonted tranquillity which he now enjoyed, yet who, it appeared to
him, could have set out the entire matter in a much more satisfactory
way from the beginning, he was made aware by the unexpected beating of
many gongs, and by other signs of refined and deferential welcome, that
a person of exalted rank was approaching his residence. While he was
still hesitating in his uncertainty regarding the most courteous and
delicate form of self-abasement with which to honour so important a
visitor--whether to rush forth and allow the chair-carriers to pass over
his prostrate form, to make a pretence of being a low-caste slave, and
in that guise doing menial servic