The day after the gathering at Cherished Garden, wind and rain raged. Chen Caozhi did not go to Zhenqing Daoist Abbey; he and Lu Weiwei had agreed before that they would not meet in stormy weather.
The second day after the gathering was a day off from school. After lunch at the Xu Clan School, Chen Caozhi went to the Lu residence to pay his respects to Governor Lu Na and return the two calligraphy modelbooks, along with his copies of them. This was Lu Na's requirement: Chen Caozhi could borrow the modelbooks, but he had to submit copies when he returned them. Thus, over the past month and more, several scrolls of Chen Caozhi's copies had accumulated in Lu Na's study. When she was not tending her flowers and trees, Lu Weiwei often came here to unroll and admire them, her slender fingers gently stroking the scrolls as she smiled, lost in thought.
Lu Na had a large collection of original inscriptions and calligraphy by celebrated masters of past ages. He invited Chen Caozhi to choose another two works to take back and copy, but this time Chen Caozhi chose only one: a scroll of Zhang Zhi's "Treatise on the Heart of the Brush." Like Wei Heng's "Four Forms of Calligraphy," the "Treatise on the Heart of the Brush" was an essay on calligraphy, written by Zhang Zhi. It had been lost to later generations, but here and now, Lu Na did not regard it as a priceless treasure.
Zhang Zhi was a great calligrapher who bridged past and future. He practiced with extraordinary diligence, writing on all the silk intended for clothing in his household before having it washed and dyed. He practiced beside a pond until its waters turned entirely black with ink. Finding the slow, undulating