24

Staying away from court for several days, Genji worked hard to make her feel at home. He wrote down all manner of poems for her to copy, and drew all manner of pictures, some of them very good. “I sigh, though I have not seen Musashi,” * he wrote on a bit of lavender paper. She took it up, and thought the hand marvelous. In a tiny hand he wrote beside it:

“Thick are the dewy grasses of Musashi,

Near this grass to the grass I cannot have.”

“Now you must write something.”

“But I can't.” She looked up at him, so completely without affectation that he had to smile.

“You can't write as well as you would like to, perhaps, but it would be wrong of you not to write at all. You must think of me as your teacher.”

It was strange that even her awkward, childish way of holding the brush should so delight him. Afraid she had made a mistake, she sought to conceal what she had written. He took it from her.

“I do not know what it is that makes you sigh.

And whatever grass can it be I am so near to?”

The hand was very immature indeed, and yet it had strength, and character. It was very much like her grandmother's. A touch of the modern and it would not be at all unacceptable. He ordered dollhouses and as the two of them played together he found himself for the first time neglecting his sorrows.