3

The little boy, who had been with his nurse, emerged from her cur-tains. Very pretty indeed, he tugged purposefully at Genji's sleeve. He was wearing a robe of white gossamer and a red chemise of a finely figured Chinese weave. All tangled up in his skirts, he seemed bent on divesting himself of these cumbersome garments and had stripped himself naked to the waist. Though of course it is the sort of thing all little children do, he was so pretty in his dishabille that Genji was reminded of a doll carved from a newly stripped willow. The shaven head had the blue-black tinge of the dewflower,+ and the lips were red and full. Already there was a sort of quelling repose about the eyes. Genji was strongly reminded of Kashiwagi, but not even Kashiwagi had had such remarkable good looks. How was one to explain them? There was scarcely any resemblance at all to the Third Princess. Genji thought of his own face as he saw it in the mirror, and was not sure that a comparison of the two was ridiculous. Able to walk a few steps, the boy tottered up to a bowl of bamboo shoots. He bit at one and, having rejected it, scattered them in all directions.

“What vile manners! Do something, someone. Get them away from him. These women are not kind, sir, and they will already be calling you a little glutton. Will that please you?” He took the child in his arms. “Don't you notice something rather different about his eyes? I have not seen great numbers of children, but I would have thought that at his age they are children and no more, one very much like another. But he is such an individual that he worries me. We have a little princess in residence, and he may be her ruination and his Own. Will I live, I wonder, to watch them

grow up?'If we wish to see them we have but to stay alive.'“* He was gazing earnestly at the little boy.

“Please, my lord. That is as good as inviting bad luck,” said one of the women.

Just cutting his teeth, the boy had found a good teething object. He dribbled furiously as he bit at a bamboo shoot.

“I see that his desires take him in a different direction,” Genji said, laughing.

“We cannot forget unpleasant associations.

We do not discard the young bamboo even so.”

He parted child and bamboo, but the boy only laughed and went on about Iris business.