fearful with a guilty conscience

fearful with a guilty conscience

It is a Chinese idiom, Hu á izhegu ǐ t ā I in pinyin, which means there is something hidden in one's mind. It's from Yuan Dynasty's Wu Mingshi's "Bao makeup box".

The idiom comes from the second fold of Yuan Wu Ming Shi's Baozhuang makeup box: "the box contains the prince, and the belly contains the ghost fetus." Chapter 5 of Shi Naian's outlaws of the marsh in Ming Dynasty: Liu Taigong was pregnant with ghosts, and the makers were all holding two handfuls of sweat. When they came out of the village, they saw forty or fifty torches in the distance, and a group of people and horses galloped up to the village. Feng Menglong, Ming Dynasty, Volume 16 of Xingshi Hengyan: "Mrs. Lu always knows where her son came from. There must be some interference in the killing today, but she doesn't dare to ask him, but she is also pregnant with a ghost." In the seventh chapter of Cao Xueqin's dream of Red Mansions in the Qing Dynasty, "Si Qi is in a trance with a ghost in his heart Chapter 95 of a dream of Red Mansions by Cao Xueqin in Qing Dynasty: Xiren and others are pregnant with ghosts and dare not provoke him for fear that he will be angry.