Prologue
"I can't. It has too bitter a taste."
"'Be always as though in fear and trembling.'"
"Fear of what?" asked Yuhan gaily. She put one slim leg in the air. Her toes were like pink coral.
The Amah reveled in righteousness. "Such should be the attitude of a virtuous girl."
"But I don't know how to tremble."
"Practice it."
"I'm too busy enjoying all that is beautiful."
The Amah turned once more to the bamboo book,
"'A wife should be the shadow and echo of her husband.'"
"That doesn't apply to me, I'm only a concubine."
"The concubine of a young Prince!"
"Still not his wife."
"That, too, may come."
"Not if I turn into an echo and go trembling all over the Palace."
The Amah tried not to smile. "'Women's energies have a fourfold scope; behavior, speech, appearance, no great beauty.'"
"Why not?"
The Amah went right on reading as though she had not been interrupted. "'And for right duties, no special cunning of hand. In simplicity, in purity, in a sense of shame and of propriety, will right behavior be found. In choice of language, in avoidance of bad words.'"
"There are no bad words; there are only bad people."
"'In seasonable and not too prolonged talk, will
