No one felt a social decline more keenly or more pathetically than Suyun. She was morose and unhappy in the Tseng home, partly because of an imagined atmosphere of gossip behind her back, and partly because she was disappointed in Chinya. Hence she was living most of the time with her family in Tientsin, although Chinya had got a job in the new Republican government in Peking. Since she was bearing no great responsibility in the home, every time she asked for permission to go to Tientsin, Mrs. Tseng consented. At Tientsin, her family were beginning their new life, and she was beginning hers. In that great port, swarming with a humanity uprooted, she felt the fascination of a new kind of gold worship, the thrill of new and modern luxuries, the gaiety of dance halls, theaters, motor cars, and new fashions, the convenient obliteration of all old associations and standards and the setting up of a simple standard of social success -- anyone who has money is respected, and anyone who is respected has money -- with which she was in instinctive sympathy. She felt stimulated every time she came to Tientsin and remained as long as she could, and when she returned she found Peking dull and depressing by comparison. As she grew more and more used to the treaty port life, she began more and more to think of her Peking home as a prison.

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