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Zhenbao looked out of the window. The sky was blue and the clouds were white, the oleander was blooming in the courtyard, and the flute was still playing in the street—as sharp and wheedling as the voice of a low-class woman. It wasn’t a very good flute. The notes were shrill and hurt his ears.

…

Dubao came, and Zhenbao casually brought the conversation round to Jiaorui. Dubao tapped his cigarette like a man of experience: “She ’s gotten old, really old.” Which apparently meant, for a woman, that she was finished.

Zhenbao reviewed the scene that morning: yes, she had grown old. But even …

From that time on much came to his mind that made him a little better than other people, because there was a small warm shadow that had fallen across his brilliant life.

That was no help to Tonka now. But it was a help to him. And this even though human life flows too fast for anyone to hear eac…

Then she told him of a dream she had had a few nights earlier. For Tonka also had dreams.

“In my dream I knew I was going to die soon,” she said. “And it ’s a funny thing, you know, but I was very glad. I had a bag of cherries, and I said to myself: ‘Never mind, you just gobble them up quick bef…

‘Either I must make Tonka my wife,’ he told himself, ‘or I must give her up and give up these thoughts.’

But no one will blame him for doing neither one nor the other, despite these reasonings of his. For although all such thoughts and feelings may well be justified, nobody nowadays doubts that …