Excellent fiend! Halting its dark wind, it gave its body a shake there in a fold of the mountain and turned into a maiden of moon-like face and flower-like features — brows clear and eyes lovely beyond all telling, teeth white and lips red.

好妖精 — excellent fiend! — is the storyteller applauding, exactly as he applauded 好猴王 a few passages back. He is not endorsing her; he is admiring the craft, the way an audience applauds a good villain. 搖身一變 (yáo shēn yí biàn), one shake of the body and the change is done, is the standard shape-shifting formula throughout the novel. The beauty vocabulary is entirely off the peg: 月貌花容, a face like the moon and features like a flower; 眉清目秀, clear brows and fine eyes; 齒白唇紅, white teeth and red lips. Readings: both instances of 那 point at something, so both are nà; the 兒 of 女兒 is the full noun ér; and 不 rises to bú in 說不盡, before the falling tone of 盡.

In her left hand she carried a grey-sand jar, in her right a green porcelain bottle; and from west to east she came, making straight for the Tang Monk:

The props are the tell, and they are perfect. A beautiful woman alone on a mountain is strange. A beautiful woman carrying somebody's lunch has a reason to be there. That is the whole confidence trick, and it is done with a jar and a bottle. 提著 twice over, 著 as zhe, keeping both hands full. The 兒 on 罐兒 and 瓶兒 is the small friendly tag that shrinks a word — the little jar, the little bottle — and that one is read er, unlike the standalone noun ér in 女兒 a line above. The colon at the end means verse is coming.

The holy monk had rested his horse upon the crag when of a sudden he saw a skirted, hairpinned woman drawing near.

裙釵 (qún chāi) — skirt and hairpin — is a woman named by what she wears, the way English once said "a petticoat". What follows is a 律詩 (lǜ shī), a strict eight-line regulated poem, and the cruelty is in the choice of form: the novel is spending its finest portrait verse on something that is not a woman at all.

Kingfisher sleeves swayed light, sheathing jade bamboo-shoots; the Xiang-silk skirt, drawn aslant, showed golden lotuses.

Two stock figures, both worth knowing. 玉筍 (yù sǔn), jade bamboo-shoots, means fingers — slender, tapering to a point, which is what a young bamboo shoot does. 金蓮 (jīn lián), golden lotus, means bound feet: the period's ideal of beauty and its cruellest fashion. 湘裙 (xiāng qún) is a skirt of Xiang silk, from the river region famous for weaving it — a brand name, in effect.

Sweat on her powdered face — a flower holding dew; dust brushing her moth-brows — willows wreathed in mist.

Both lines take a flaw and convert it into an ornament. She is sweaty and dusty, because she has supposedly been walking; the poem turns the sweat into dew on a flower and the dust into mist among willows. 蛾眉 (é méi), moth-brows, is the standard image for a beauty's fine arched eyebrows, named for the feathery antennae of a moth.

Look closely, fix the eye upon her — and see, step by step she came right up to his side.

The portrait stops and the figure starts moving. 看看, look and look, pushes the reader's eye forward step by step until she is standing right there. The readings are all the ordinary ones: 仔 is zǐ, 觀 is guān, 行 is xíng.