13

Fujitsubo was ill and had gone home to her family. Genji managed a sympathetic thought or two for his lonely father, but his thoughts were chiefly on the possibility of seeing Fujitsubo. He quite halted his visits to other ladies. All through the day, at home and at court, he sat gazing off into space, and in the evening he would press Omyo~bu to be his intermediary. How she did it I do not know; but she contrived a meeting. It is sad to have to say that his earlier attentions, so unwelcome, no longer seemed real, and the mere thought that they had been successful was for Fujitsubo a torment.+ Determined that there would not be another meeting, she was shocked to find him in her presence again. She did not seek to hide her distress, and her efforts to turn him away delighted him even as they put him to shame. There was no one else quite like her. In that fact was his undoing: he would be less a prey to longing if he could find in her even a trace of the ordinary. And the tumult of thoughts and feelings that now assailed him—he would have liked to consign it to the Mountain of Obscurity.# It might have been better, he sighed, so short was the night, if he had not come at all.

“So few and scattered the nights, so few the dreams.

Would that the dream tonight might take me with it.”

He was in tears, and she did, after all, have to feel sorry for him.

“Were I to disappear in the last of dreams

Would yet my name live on in infamy?”

She had every right to be unhappy, and he was sad for her. Omyo~bu gathered his clothes and brought them out to him.