搖拽緗裙 Green Sleeves And Yellow Skirts
但見那：但见那：
逐句解 Line by line
Behold them:
Three characters this time, against the two that opened the last set-piece — 但見那 points at the women rather than at a place.
Kingfisher sleeves flying; pale-yellow skirts trailing.
拽 is yè again — the same character that stretched a stride five passages back now drags a hem. 緗 is a specific colour, the pale yellow of raw silk, and it is doing the work a brand name does: this is what the fabric costs.
Kingfisher sleeves flying, and low beneath them the slender jade bamboo-shoots; pale-yellow skirts trailing, and half out from under them the narrow golden lotuses.
玉筍, jade bamboo shoots, means fingers; 金蓮, golden lotus, means a bound foot. Both are stock and both are euphemisms, and the couplet is built so that each garment lifts to show what is under it. 著 is zhe, the marker of a state going on — the sleeves hang low over the hands and stay there.
Form and bearing complete at every point; in motion and at rest, a thousand turns of heel and slipper.
屣 is xǐ — 康熙 尸部十一畫 gives 所綺切 and glosses it 履不躡跟也, a shoe worn without pulling the heel up, which is to say a slipper trodden down at the back. Exactly the footwear you would kick a ball in. It is also one of the three closes in this long piece that do NOT rhyme with the rest: 中原音韻 files it in 齊微, alongside 洗 and 徙, while nearly every other line here closes on 皆來.
The description opens on clothes and works inward, which is the standard order for this kind of set-piece, and the standard order for looking someone over.
Both euphemisms in the middle couplet are worth knowing because both are still quoted. Jade shoots for slim fingers is harmless. The golden lotus is not: it is the standard term for a bound foot, and it carries the whole weight of what was done to women's feet for a thousand years. The poem uses it admiringly, as its period did.
One reading threads back through the chapter. The character that says a skirt trails here is the same one that stretched a stride when the master walked up to the farmstead, five passages back. One word, and the second use is already dressing the trap the first walked into.