The first scene introduces a young scholar, Tsai-yung, face to face with the alternatives of remaining in his village to take care of his aged parents or of going to the capital in search of honors and lucrative posts. His own wishes are to remain at home, less for his parents’ sake than because of the beautiful wife whom he has married but two months ago. But his father urges him to go to Ch’ang An, to use his talents, and to gain fame and wealth. “At fifteen one must study, at thirty a man must act.” A friend of the family, an elderly gentleman called Chang, sides with the father against the mother, who wishes to keep her son at home. She tells the story of a young man who had left his family to take the examination at the capital, but who, when at last his learning had gained him a post as superintendent of an almshouse, found his parents as inmates in the very institution. The young wife takes no part in the discussion at all; in fact, the elderly gentlemen seem to consider affection for her an unmanly weakness on the son’s part. “He thinks of nothing but love and the sweet pleasures of the nuptial couch,” says his father. “Here it’s two months that he is married, and yet one cannot tear him away from this place.” This represents a very common attitude in China—I remember reading in a Peking paper in 1917 in an attack on the vice-president of Tsing Hua College that one of his faults was that he occasionally went walking with his wife! One of my students from Shansi told me one day that he had been married during the summer vacation. I asked whether his wife was with him in Peking, and when he answered in the negative, whether he was writing to her. “Oh, no,” he said shamefacedly, “I wouldn’t do such a thing.” [Illustration: A CHINESE ARTIST’S CONCEPTION OF TWO PIOUS SOULS] The father calls on the son to state what he understands by filial piety. The son answers by quoting the “Book of Rites,” “It is the duty of the son to take every care that in summer as well as in winter his parents should enjoy all comforts of life. He must every evening himself arrange the bed on which they are to sleep; every morning at the first crowning of the cock he must inquire in affectionate terms about the state of their health; then, in the course of the day, he must ask repeatedly whether they are suffering from the cold or whether the heat incommodes them. The duty of the son is to watch over his parents wherever they go, to love those whom they love, honor those whom they honor; he must even love the horses and dogs whom his father loves.” And he adds from the “Sayings of Confucius”: “A son should not leave the home of his father and his mother so long as they are still living.”