Page:Alien Souls by Achmed Abdullah (1922).djvu/229

Kwoh, the "Great-Pure Kingdom"; and so Yu Ching had compared Marie Na Liu's love to a dewdrop on a willow spray, a flaunting of fairy pennons, and the sound of a silver bell in the green mists of twilight—smiling, with kindly intent, at the last simile; for he had been forty-seven years of age and she sixteen when he had married her, quite respectably, with a narrow gold ring, a bouquet of cabbagy, wired roses, a proper, monumental wedding cake, a slightly shocked Baptist clergyman mumbling the words of the blessed ritual, and at the organ a yellow, half-caste boy introducing wailing Cantonese dissonances into the "Voice that breathed o'er Eden."

Down at the "Place of Sweet Desire and Heavenly Entertainment," the comment had been brutally unflattering.

"You are old, and she is young!" had said Nag Hong Fah, the paunchy restaurant proprietor, fluttering his paper fan. "Hayah! On the egg combating with the stone, the yolk came out, O wise and older brother!"

"The ass went seeking for horns—and lost its ears!" Yung Lung, the wholesale grocer, had darkly suggested.

And Yu Ch'ang, the priest of the joss temple, had added with pontifical unction:

"When I see the sun and the moon delivered up by the eclipse to the hands of the demons; when I perceive the bonds that fasten an elephant; and when I behold a wise man surrendering—ah—to the fool ish abominations of the flesh, the thought forces itself upon me: 'How mighty is the power of evil!'"

Thus, at the time of their marriage, had run the