Volume Three, Chapter Ten

"Who told Xiaoru not to listen? Were the clothes I chose for you so ugly?" Zhao Huangpu glanced pointedly at the Gauze Robe and silk gown discarded beside the Dragon Bed. The gauzy silk was as soft as skin, its pink alluring. He had eagerly imagined how lovely she would look in them, but from the moment she entered his Sleeping Quarters, she had been on guard. She huddled in a corner in her wet clothes, arms around her knees, and looked at the women's clothes he had so carefully chosen with open distaste.

"Your Majesty, a scholar may be killed but not humiliated." Her cool retort lodged in his chest. She was a woman to begin with, yet showing her feminine beauty before him counted as humiliation? Was she so determined to keep him outside the threshold of romance?

He had brought silks, scented balms, and face powder, hoping to please her as any man might please the woman he loved. He had hoped she might show a little awareness that a woman adorned herself for the one who delighted in her. Instead, she refused even to look. She knelt where she was, preferring to wear wet clothes, drip water, and shiver as she earnestly confessed her supposed crime of deceiving the sovereign. "This student... no, this guilty official concealed her identity as a woman and deceived Your Majesty to enter government service. I beg Your Majesty to consider my steadfast loyalty and sentence me leniently."

His joy plunged to the bottom of a ravine and stuck in his throat. His hand, still holding the soft, pretty clothes, fell to his side. Looking down, he asked, "...Then how do you want me to sentence you?" She had changed how she addressed herself: not "this student," but "this guilty official."