10

Murasaki too had become addicted to romances. Her excuse was that Genji's little daughter insisted on being read to.

“Just see what a fine one this is,” she said, showing Genji an illustration for _The Tale of Kumano_. * The young girl in tranquil and confident slumber made her think of her own younger self. “How precocious even very little children seem to have been. I suppose I might have set myself up as a specimen of the slow, plodding variety. I would have won that competition easily.”

Genji might have been the hero of some rather more eccentric stories.

“You must not read love stories to her. I doubt that clandestine affairs would arouse her unduly, but we would not want her to think them commonplace.”

What would Tamakazura have made of the difference between his remarks to her and these remarks to Murasaki?

“I would not of course offer the wanton ones as a model,” replied Murasaki, “but I would have doubts too about the other sort. Lady Ate-miya in _The Tale of the Hollow Tree_, for Instance. She is always very brisk and efficient and in control of things, and she never makes mistakes; but there is something unwomanly about her cool manner and clipped speech.”

“I should imagine that it is in real life as in fiction. We are all human and we all have our ways. It is not easy to be unerringly right. Proper, well-educated parents go to great trouble over a daughter's education and tell themselves that they have done well if something quiet and demure emerges. It seems a pity when defects come to light one after another and people start asking what her good parents can possibly have been up to. Yet the rewards are very great when a girl's manner and behavior seem just right for her station. Even then empty praise is not satisfying. One knows that the girl is not perfect and looks at her more critically than before. I would not wish my own daughter to be praised by people who have no standards.”

He was genuinely concerned that she acquit herself well in the tests that lay before her.

Wicked stepmothers are of course standard fare for the romancers, and he did not want them poisoning relations between Murasaki and the child. He spent a great deal of time selecting romances he thought suitable, and ordered them copied and illustrated.