She had been dropped from a palanquin in her sixth year; sharp pains soon after burned in her hip, and the corresponding leg had perceptibly shortened. A great many remedies were tried in vain--burning with charcoal, the application of black plasters, sweating, acupuncture--sticking long needles into the afflicted part. The doctors declared that the five elements of her body--the metal, wood, water, fire and earth, were hopelessly out of equilibrium. Her mother had then called necromancers and devil charmers; lucky and unlucky days were explored; strange rites were conducted before her terrified eyes screwed into the determination to show no alarm. A year, perhaps, after they had become resigned to her injury, her father, always a man of the most liberal ideas, had suddenly brought into the garden to see her an English doctor passing through China. Against the wailing protests of the women the Englishman had been given authority to treat her; and he had caused to be made a thin steel brace, clasping Taou Yuen's waist and extending in a rigid band down the length of her injured leg. After putting a high shoe on her other foot he had commanded them to keep the brace on her for two years. It was through that period of comparative inactivity that she acquired a habit of reading and thought, a certain grasp of philosophical attitude, common to the higher masculine Chinese mind but rare among their women. She had, for instance, later, read Laotze's Tao-teh-king, and been impressed by his tranquil elevation above the petty ills and concerns of life and the flesh. Her father, like all the ruling class, regarded Taoism--which had, indeed, degenerated into a mass of nonsense about the transmutation of base metals into gold and the elixir of life--with contempt. But this seemed to her no depreciation of the Greatly Eminent One or his philosophy of the two Taoes. The household, or at least the family, worshipped in the form of Confucius; his precepts and admonitions, the sacred _hiao_ or filial submission, the tablets and ancestral piety, were a part of her blood; as was the infinitely fainter infusion of Buddhism; yet in her intellectual brooding it was to the Tao-teh-king that she returned. She paused to recall that, the brace at last removed, she was practically completely recovered; but the bent, the bracing, given her mind had remained. The colorful pageant of her first marriage, the smaller but splendidly appointed house of her husband--he was extremely intelligent and had honorably passed the examination for licentiate, one of only two hundred successful bachelors out of twenty thousand--and the period following his accidental drowning wheeled quickly through her brain.... Only Gerrit Ammidon was left.