4

The princess was tiny and delicate and still very frightened. She quite refused the medicines that were pressed upon her. In the worst of the crisis she had hoped that she might quietly die and so make her escape. Genji behaved with the strictest correctness and was determined to give no grounds for suspicion. Yet he somehow thought the babe repellent and was held by certain of the women to be rather chilly.

“He doesn't seem to like it at all.” One of the old women interrupted her cooings. “And such a pretty little thing too. You're almost afraid for it. And so late in his life, when he has had so few.”

The princess caught snatches of their conversation and seemed to see a future of growing coldness and aloofness. She knew that she too was to blame and she began to think of becoming a nun. Although Genji paid an occasional daytime visit, he never stayed the night.

“I feel the uncertainty of it all more than ever,” he said, pulling her curtains back. “I sometimes wonder how much time I have left. I have been occupied with my prayers and I have thought that you would not want to see people and so I have stayed away. And how are you? A little more yourself again? You have been through a great deal.”

“I almost feel that I might not live” She raised her head from her pillow. “But I know that it would be a very grave sin to die now.* I rather think I might like to become a nun. I might begin to feel better, and even if I were to die I might be forgiven.” She seemed graver and more serious than before, and more mature.

“Quite out of the question—it would only invite trouble. What can have put the idea into your head? I could understand if you really were going to die, but of course you are not.”

But he was thinking that if she felt constrained to say such things, then the generous and humane course might be to let her become a nun. To require that she go on living as his wife would be cruel, and for him too things could not be the same again. He might hurt her and word of what he had done might get abroad and presently reach her royal father. Perhaps she was right: the present crisis could be her excuse. But then he thought of the long life ahead of her, as long as the hair which she was asking to have cut—and he thought that he could not bear to see her in a nun's drab robes.

“No, you must be brave,” he said, urging medicine upon her. “There is nothing wrong with you. The lady in the east wing has recovered from a far worse illness. We really did think she was dead. The world is neither as cruel nor as uncertain as we sometimes think it.”

There was a rather wonderful calm in the figure before him, pale and thin and quite drained of strength. Her offense had been a grave one, but he thought that he had to forgive her.