Her rights are few, and depend on custom rather than law. She now possesses the right of remarriage, and that of remaining unmarried till she is sixteen, and she can refuse permission to her husband for his concubines to occupy the same house with herself. She is powerless to divorce her husband, conjugal fidelity, typified by the goose, the symbolic figure at a wedding, being a feminine virtue solely. Her husband may cast her off for seven reasons--incurable disease, theft, childlessness, infidelity, jealousy, incompatibility with her parents-in-law, and a quarrelsome disposition. She may be sent back to her father’s house for any one of these causes. It is believed, however, that desertion is far more frequent than divorce. By custom rather than law she has certain recognized rights, as to the control of children, redress in case of damage, etc. Domestic happiness is a thing she does not look for. The Korean has a house, but no home. The husband has his life apart; common ties of friendship and external interest are not known. His pleasure is taken in company with male acquaintances and _gesang_; and the marriage relationship is briefly summarized in the remark of a Korean gentleman in conversation with me on the subject, “We marry our wives, but we love our concubines.” CHAPTER XXX EXORCISTS AND DANCING WOMEN At Cha-san, a magistracy, we rejoined the road from which we had diverged on the northward journey. It is a quiet, decayed place, though in a good agricultural country. As I had been there before, the edge of curiosity was blunted, and there was no mobbing. The people gave a distressing account of their sufferings from the Chinese soldiers, who robbed them unscrupulously, took what they wanted without paying, and maltreated the women. The Koreans deserted, through fright, the adjacent ferry village of Ou-Chin-gang, where we previously crossed the Tai-döng, and it was held by 53 Chinese, being an important post. Two Japanese scouts appeared on the other side of the river, fired, and the Chinese detachment broke and fled! At Cha-san, as elsewhere, the people expressed intense hatred of the Japanese, going so far as to say that they would not leave one of them alive; but, as in all other places, they bore unwilling testimony to the good conduct of the soldiers, and the regularity with which the commissariat paid for supplies.