Liang and his brothers. The children fell silent the moment he went out and seemed to have gone away. He followed and talked to them, but they did not answer him. He came back into the room as quietly as a shadow and put the peanuts back in the package.
"They don't even want to eat my things," he said in a low, mocking, defiant tone.
I felt saddened, but I said with a forced smile, "Lien-shu, I think you take things too hard. You are too misanthropic . . . "
He smiled a wry smile.
"I have not yet finished what I was going to say. I suppose you think that we, we who occasionally drop in to see you, come here because we have nothing else to do and are only trying to use you as an object of amusement?"
"No, not always, though I think that way sometimes. People like to shop for material for conversation."
"You are wrong there. People are not in reality like that. The truth is that you have woven yourself a cocoon of loneliness and wrapped yourself up in it. You ought to try to concede more light in the world."
"Perhaps it is so. But tell me, where comes the silk filaments with which the cocoon is made? Of course there are many people like that in this world. My grandmother was one of them. Though I have not shared her blood I might yet inherit her fate. It does not matter very much, for I have mourned both for her and for myself."
I recalled vividly his grandmother's encoffining, every detail reappearing before my eyes.
"I never understood your heartrending cries at the time," I bluntly stated.
"You mean at my grandmother's encoffining? Yes, it
