The Lyric of Joy runs:

The first of four titles, each a single character with the word for a lyric after it. Set the four characters together and they spell out the phrase the narrator used a line ago.

Joy, joy, joy — and gladness in it. The marriage is made, the love of it is sweet. Deft in her palace dress — how should the moon lady compare? Dragon pin and phoenix pin, glittering, flying with gold thread.

The lyric opens by saying its own title three times, which is what all four of them do, and the effect is a chant rather than a poem. 嫦娥怎比 is the second and last time this chapter names Chang'e, the woman who swallowed the drug of immortality and rose to live alone in the moon. The first was Eight Rules confessing that he got drunk and made sport with her, which is what got him thrown out of heaven. So the yardstick this bride is being measured against is a woman one of the men in the building has personally offended. The novel puts the two mentions two thousand six hundred and eighty-six characters apart and says nothing.

Cherry lips, white teeth, a red face, slender and swaying, a body light as a flower.

A catalogue of features, and every item of it is standing stock. 櫻唇皓齒 — cherry lips and white teeth — is the fixed pair for a beauty and has been for centuries. 娜 in 嬝娜 is nuó, slender and swaying, not the nà the character takes when it is transcribing a foreign name. This is a description that could be pasted onto any bride in any book, which is worth holding on to, since the point of the scene is that this bride is not what she appears.

Brocade layer on layer, in among the five colours;

Three characters and then three more. 錦重重 uses the doubled character with the reading chóng, a layer, rather than the zhòng of weight — the two senses live in one character and this chapter uses both.

fragrance stirring and stirring, among the thousand of gold.

⚠ THE ONE UNSETTLED READING IN THIS CHAPTER, and it is a matter of printing rather than sense. The doubled word here is written with two different characters — 拂佛 — where the matching phrase above it, 錦重重, doubles one character twice. This chapter itself writes the same doubled word the ordinary way, 薰風拂拂, in the summer screen poem eight hundred and ninety-nine characters earlier. And measured over all hundred chapters, 拂佛 occurs here and nowhere else, while the ordinary spelling occurs in two other chapters. So the second character is almost certainly standing in for the first, the way this edition confuses near-identical characters elsewhere. The text is encoded as printed and the reading given is the one the second character takes everywhere else in this book, where it is the Buddha. The alternative is flagged rather than applied.

The Lyric of Meeting runs:

The second title, and the second character of the phrase.

Meeting, meeting, meeting — bewitching and lovely. She outdoes Mao Qiang, she puts the girls of Chu to shame. A ruin of kingdoms and a ruin of cities, she stands against flowers, she stands against jade. Her adornment is fresher still, her pins and rings the more brilliant.

Mao Qiang was a beauty of the state of Yue, and she is named in the old philosophers as the standard case — the woman all men called lovely and all fish fled from. 傾國傾城 is still one of the commonest phrases in Chinese for a beautiful woman, and it is grimmer than it sounds: it means she topples cities and topples kingdoms. It comes from a Han song about a girl whose one glance cost a city and whose second cost a state. Applied to this bride, in this chapter, it is exact.

Orchid heart and iris nature, pure and lofty; powdered face and ice-clear skin, honoured and noble. Dark brows in a single line, faint as distant hills; graceful and delicate, gathered in ranks of brocade.

遠山 brows — eyebrows drawn as a far range of hills — is a real cosmetic style with a name and a history, credited to a Han beauty and imitated for centuries afterwards. 攢 is cuán again, gathering in — the same reading it took in Tripitaka's autumn poem about chrysanthemums a few hundred characters ago, and the same one it takes here about women in a line.