18

Back at Nijo~, his Murasaki, now on the eve of womanhood, was very pretty indeed. So red could after all be a pleasing color, he thought. She was delightful, at artless play in a soft cloak of white lined with red. Because of her grandmother's conservative preferences, her teeth had not yet been blackened or her eyebrows plucked. Genji had put one of the women to blackening her eyebrows, which drew fresh, graceful arcs. Why, he continued asking himself, should he go seeking trouble outside the house when he had a treasure at home? He helped arrange her dollhouses. She drew amusing little sketches, coloring them as the fancy took her. He drew a lady with very long hair and gave her a very red nose, and though it was only a picture it produced a shudder. He looked at his own handsome face in a mirror and daubed his nose red, and even he was immediately grotesque. The girl laughed happily.

“And if I were to be permanently disfigured?”

“I wouldn't like that at all.” She seemed genuinely worried.

He pretended to wipe vigorously at his nose. “Dear me. I fear it will not be white again. I have played a very stupid trick upon myself. And what,” he said with great solemnity, “will my august father say when he sees it?”

Looking anxiously up at him, Murasaki too commenced rubbing at his nose.

“Don't, if you please, paint me a Heichu~ black.* I think I can endure the red.” They were a charming pair.

The sun was warm and spring-like, to make one impatient for blos-soms on branches now shrouded in a spring haze. The swelling of the plum buds was far enough advanced that the rose plum beside the roofed stairs, the earliest to bloom, was already showing traces of color.

“The red of the florid nose fails somehow to please,

Though one longs for red on these soaring branches of plum.

“A pity that it should be so.”

And what might have happened thereafter to our friends?

{An Autumn Exersion}