In the Tianbao era there was a young man of Chang’an known only as Zheng the Sixth — poor, landless, living on the charity of his wife’s family, and devoted to wine and women in about equal measure. His good friend was Wei Yin, ninth son of a great house, rich and generous and fond of him.
One summer day, as Zheng rode his donkey across the city, he fell in behind three women walking in the road, and the one in white was so beautiful that he could not stop himself from weaving his donkey first ahead of her, then behind, mustering the courage to speak. The lady in white glanced back from time to time, and her glances were not discouraging. At last he managed a greeting, and she answered, and by evening he had followed her home to a walled villa and been asked to stay.
Her name was Ren. The villa, he soon learned, was rented by no human agent, and his friends, when he boasted of his luck, told him the lane she lived in was a ruined waste where no house stood. Zheng went back by daylight and found only a broken wall and an abandoned garden. But that night she was there again, and she did not lie to him. “You know what I am,” she said. “If it disgusts you, go. If not — I will keep your house better than any woman of your own kind.”
He stayed. And she did keep his house: she rented rooms, bought and sold horses at a profit, fed and clothed them both, and loved him with a single-heartedness that shamed his old life. He had a wife elsewhere, and he left her. The fox was his household now.
The trouble came from his friend. Wei Yin had never seen Ren and, hearing of her beauty, sent gifts, then came himself — and finding Zheng out, forced his way in and seized her. She fought him with a strength he had not expected, and when at last his strength failed and she stood over him gasping, she said the thing that turned him: “You are rich and well-born and have women at your word. Zheng has nothing in the world but me. A man like you should be ashamed to take the one possession of a poor friend.” Wei Yin stood a long moment with his head down, then straightened his clothes, bowed to her, and never touched her again. He became instead their patron, sending money and gifts for years, and she received him as a friend and taught him, when he asked, the arts of pleasing women — though she would never be one of them.
So it might have gone on. But Zheng was at last given a minor post in the west, and had to travel, and wanted Ren with him. She begged to stay. “I have cast the omens,” she said. “The western road is death for me this year. Wait with me one season and go in spring.” Zheng, half laughing and half annoyed — for how could a fox be afraid of a journey? — pressed her, and Wei Yin pressed her too, and in the end, against every sign, she went.
At Mashan, on the road, they met the imperial huntsmen exercising their greyhounds. The hounds came out of the grass like grey lightning, and the woman riding beside Zheng the Sixth was no longer there — in her place a small white fox ran for its life across the plain, and the hounds ran faster, and it was over before he could scream. When the hunt moved on, Zheng gathered what the dogs had left and buried her by the road, and went on to his posting with her horse’s saddle empty beside him.
The teller of the tale, who knew Wei Yin, ends it with a small and terrible observation: that Ren had been faithful to Zheng as few human wives are faithful, that she had died for the crime of accompanying the man she loved, and that if a fox could be a better woman than most women, perhaps the measure of a person is not what they are born as, but what they choose to be.