Lady Li

The moral centre of the chapter's first half, and it gives her a poem. Ma Miao's wife, of the Li family, who asks him how he can be so unaffected by the danger on the borders and gets his intention to surrender for an answer: 'You call yourself a man! Have you such a disloyal and treacherous heart? Is it nothing to have held office and taken pay for years? How can I bear to look upon your face?' 'Ma Miao was too ashamed to attempt to reply.' When the town falls she hangs herself. Deng Ai, told why, orders an honourable burial and goes in person to sacrifice — 'Then did a woman show herself most noble, / So noble in conduct, / That no leader equaled her.'