Mah-li returned to her slowly, her eyes fixed on the ground. She lifted her head and her look collided sharply with Megan's curious gaze. "That was Captain Li," she said, "the General's aide." Her eyes reminded Megan of the deer's eyes, holding a little of fear and a great deal of scorn, the scorn of a simple organism for a more complicated one. Megan felt a slight uneasiness. "Oh, yes," she replied vaguely. "Tell me, do they kill these deer?" "No," said Mah-li, after a slight pause in which she turned to look negligently at the deer, "they use the horns only." They left the medicine shop and once more got into their chairs. Megan wondered if the shopping tour had been entirely for the sake of that meeting. Having seen them together she could not doubt that Mah-li and Captain Li were lovers, and yet she was not entirely shocked. The relation of the General and Mah-li seemed to her quite as irregular. She knew that this relation was only the outgrowth of a patriarchal state of society, but she was inclined to look on the man's side of it as tyrannical and an abuse of privilege. As to its romantic importance she felt that it could not measure up in any way to what she had read in the attentive faces of Mah-li and Captain Li. But she realized her inability to weigh values with any such scales, she knew that from a lack of experience she looked on all such relations in a literary, a decorative, an unbrutal sense. Mah-li stopped at one other shop where they sold fans. She bought a black one with a multitude of tiny brilliant figures on one side and gold characters on the other. In selecting it she had them bring out quantities of fans while Megan sat beside her looking on. Mah-li did not speak to her, she was very much occupied with the fans. She carried an elaborate French purse, from one of the Russian shops of Shanghai, one of green spangles with a marcasite clasp. She was very proud of this and left it lying under piles of fans, so that she lost sight of it and then had it searched for and finally recovered after some confusion. When the fan had been wrapped in cottony paper she stood looking at it, then suddenly handed it to Megan. "I would like to give this to you," she said. "Will you please accept it?" Megan was not expecting this and said rather briefly: "Thank you." When she got into her chair she looked at the fan thoughtfully.