The next scenes show just how ungrateful her parents-in-law are for her unlimited devotion. Wu-niang herself is eating roots, buds, the bark of trees, and other things classified as material containing some slight food values in so-called “famine food books”—a type of literature enjoying a wide circulation in China. But her suspicious mother-in-law fears that the young woman is eating better food than she is serving to her, because Wu-niang eats her miserable stew in private. At one of her meals the author, by a strange realism, has her say, “When I have eaten this mess my hunger ceases, but then there begin pains in the intestines much more violent than the hunger had been.” When the mother-in-law surprises her she finds that Wu-niang had been extremely self-sacrificing instead of selfish as she had supposed, and the shock is too much for her weakened body; she dies. The husband too is very much enfeebled, and when the friend of the family, Chang, comes to call, he is mortified that he cannot rise to meet his guest. Throughout the play there is in the speeches of practically all the characters an urbanity and a politeness which show how deeply the lessons of Confucius to do or say always the fitting thing have gone over into the flesh and blood of his nationals. Wu-niang tells Chang of their greatest cause for anguish—they have not the means to give the deceased a proper burial. Chang then shows himself an ideal friend from the Chinese point of view by saying, “I shall order a servant to prepare a wooden coffin in which we shall place the body of your wife. I myself shall then select a lucky day for the funeral, and after having had a grave dug on the hill in the south, I shall accompany the procession.” The scene that gives the title to the play is one in which Tsai-yung gives expression to his tenderest emotion by playing on the lute. This instrument is regarded by the Chinese as the noblest and æsthetically the highest musical instrument in existence. A Chinese lover of music cannot find words to express the delight the lute can provide.[14] As a general thing the Chinese are ashamed to display emotion, and the Westerner is often shocked by apparent callousness, as for example when a person who has just lost a dear relative gives vent to a nervous laugh instead of yielding to tears when the subject is alluded to. Therefore it is by means of the lute that Tsai-yung gives expression to his repressed feelings. He does this with the delicate touch employed by Chinese painters in their impressionistic pictures and by the poets in their suggestive verses in which, as some one has said, the i’s are never dotted, but a definite mood is nevertheless conveyed all the more forcefully.[15] While Tsai-yung touches the strings of his instrument one servant fans him with an ivory fan, and a second burns incense, and a third places his books before him. Under such ideal conditions the Chinese scholar is quietly singing to his lute.