Some of his visitors were not very easy to put up with. They must have read Lost,[1] for they often referred to themselves as "unfortunate youths" or "forgotten men." They sprawled languidly on the chairs like so many crabs, sighing and smoking incessantly. Then there were the children, always quarreling, upsetting cups and saucers, demanding sweets, and generally making a nuisance of themselves. But as soon as Lien-shu saw them he lost his usual coldness; he seemed to cherish them more than his own life. I was told that when Third Liang had the measles he was so upset that his swarthy countenance looked darker than ever. It turned out to be a light case. The child's grandmother thought it a good joke and liked to tell about it.
"Children are always good. They have not yet been contaminated," he said to me one day as he noted my impatience with the children.
"That is not necessarily true," I said, indifferently.
"You are wrong. Children do not have the bad traits that grownups have. If they become bad later on—the kind of badness that you attack—it is because of their environment. They are not bad to start with. I think the only hope for China lies in that."
"I do not agree. If children do not have the seeds of badness in them, how can they bear bad flowers and fruits when they grow up? It is only because a seed carries within it the embryo of leaves, flowers, and fruits that it sends forth these things later on. How could it be otherwise?"
I was at the time reading Buddhist sutras, having nothing better to do—very much like the great who become vegetarians and talk about Zen the minute they are kicked out of
- ↑ A story by Yü Ta-fu published circa 1922.
