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all. The Buddhist rituals of the reception, third requiem and the release of the flame-mouth, and the burial were held, with even more jolly revelry than had accompanied the first-month ceremony for Ma Wei.
    Little by little, Mr Ma’s grief lessened, and his relatives and friends all took it upon themselves to fix him up with another wife. He was himself already well disposed towards the idea, but it was certainly no easy matter to choose the girl. A second marriage isn’t as easy to tackle as the first, and one had to take into account that he was by now somewhat of a connoisseur of women. Pretty ones had to be provided with an upkeep; then again, so did not so pretty ones, so why not have a pretty one? But there are so many pretty girls in this world! This remarrying really was a knotty problem.
    On one occasion it nearly came off, but someone was an interfering gossip and said that Ma Tse-jen was a gluttonous idler without any prospects, and the girl’s side beat a hasty retreat. On another occasion, when Ma was again on the verge of concluding the matter, somebody told him that the girl had three spots on her nose, like the ‘long three’ on a domino. That broke it up again – how could a man marry a girl with a long three on her nose!
    There was another reason to be choosy. The only way in which Ma Tse-jen felt he could cast lustre upon his ancestors was by becoming a government official. He had an earnest devotion to the notion of being a mandarin, and would not lightly pass up any chance of becoming one. Remarriage offered one such opportunity, so it went without saying that you shouldn’t rush it. Supposing he married the daughter of some senior government bigwig? Surely he’d be bound to obtain some post on the strength of his father-in-law? Or supposing . . . He did a lot of supposing, but, all said and done, supposing is mere supposition, and none of it transformed into reality.
    ‘If I could marry the daughter of a government department head,’ he would often say to others, ‘I’d be able to bank on an assistant secretaryship at the very least.’
    ‘If a department head’s got a daughter, do you imagine she would ever marry you?’ the others would reply.
    It was soon pretty clear that there were no hopes of either marriage or a government career for Ma Tse-jen.
    By the time Ma Wei had read three novels and completed his studies of the Four Books of the basic Confucian canon, Mr Ma sent him to a church school in the west end of the city, because Ma Wei could board there, which would save his father a lot of bother. When he’d nothing else to do, Mr Ma would often go to church to visit his son. There, the Reverend Ely’s words gradually enlightened his heart, and he was in due course baptised into the Christian Church. In any case, he didn’t have anything else to do, and taking a leisurely trip to the church not only proclaimed his piety but also cost him no money. After he’d been baptised, he stopped playing cards and drinking wine for a whole week, and bought an English-language bible bound in red leather for his son.
    The year the Great War ended, Ma Tse-jen’s elder brother had gone to London and opened a business selling curios. Every four or five months he would send his younger brother some money, and sometimes he would also entrust him with the task of searching for goods in Peking. Ma Tse-jen despised traders and merchants, but now and again he would bring himself to buy a few old vases and teacups and so on for his brother. Every time he went to Liu-li-ch’ang , where all the china potteries were, to purchase a few such things, he would pop round to a place by the Ch’ien-men Gate and drink a few cups of Shao-hsing wine , and eat some fried triangles .
    And then Mr Ma’s elder brother died in England. In his will he directed his brother to come to London to carry on the business.
    By this time, the Reverend Ely had already been back in England for two or three years, and Mr Ma