Baozhu returned to the Rainbow Garment Courtyard like a lost soul. The other dancers had long since grown accustomed to this, and those due to perform shortly began preparing their makeup and costumes in a bustle of activity. She had practiced the Zhezhi Dance for only a few days, and without Mi Moyan leading her, she could not complete it at all. No one summoned her to join the group performance, either.
Everything Baozhu had seen and heard that night had left her utterly distraught. Deep down, she had already sensed the heart of the matter, but fear kept her from examining it too closely. Restless and breaking into cold sweats, she dragged her shackles around the room several times, feeling she needed to do something to ease her anxiety. So she took her own sweat-soaked dance clothes and Mi Moyan's out into the courtyard.
Since leaving Chang'an, she had lost the means to wear fresh clothes every day. Along the journey, she had hired washerwomen at the inns to clean her clothing; she had never washed anything herself in her life. Now she plunged the dance clothes into a basin and rubbed them haphazardly, then, unaware that she needed to wring out the water, draped them dripping wet over the drying pole. She splashed half her own clothes wet in the process.
By the hour of the boar, the dancers who had performed began returning one after another, but Mi Moyan was still nowhere to be seen.
She caught hold of a dancer who was about to go inside to rest and asked, "When will the people serving wine come back?"
The dancer looked uncomfortable and answered tactfully, "There's no saying. It depends on whether they're kept overnight."
Utterly bewildered, Baozhu murmured to herself, "He said it wouldn't take