13

The older girl was presented at the Reizei Palace on the ninth of the month. Yu~giri provided carriages and a large escort. Kumoinokari was somewhat resentful, but did not like to think that her correspondence with Tamakazura, suddenly interesting and flourishing because of the lieutenant's tribulations, must now be at an end. She sent splendid robes for the ladies-in-waiting and otherwise helped with the arrangements.

“I was mustered into the service of a remarkably shiftless young man,” she wrote, “and I should certainly have consulted your convenience more thoroughly. Yet I think that you for your part might have kept me better informed.”

It was a gentle and circumspect protest, and Tamakazura had to admit that it was well taken.

Yu~giri also wrote. “Something has come up that requires me to be in retreat just when I ought to be with you. I am sending sons to do whatever odd jobs need to be done. Please make such use of them as you can.” He dispatched several sons, including two guards officers. She was most grateful.

Ko~bai also sent carriages. He was her brother and his wife was her stepdaughter and so relations should have been doubly close. In fact, they were rather distant. One of Makibashira's brothers came, however, to join Tamakazura's sons in the escort. How sad it was for Tamakazura, everyone said, that her husband was no longer living.

From Yu~giri's son the lieutenant there came through the usual agent the usual bombast: “My life is at an end. I am resigned and yet I am sad. Say that you are sorry. Say only that, and I shall manage to struggle on for a little while yet, I think.”

She found the two sisters together, looking very dejected. They had been inseparable, thinking even a closed door an intolerable barrier; and now they must part. Dressed for her presentation at the Reizei Palace, the older sister was very beautiful. It may have been that she was thinking sadly of the plans her father had had for her. She thought the note rather implausible, coming from someone who still had two parents living, and very splendid parents, too. Yet perhaps he was not merely gesturing and posing.

“Tell him this,” she said, jotting down a poem at the end of his note:

“When all is evanescence we all are sad,

And whose affairs does'sad' most aptly describe?”

“An unsettling sort of note,” she added, “giving certain hints of what 'sad' may possibly mean.”

He shed tears of ecstasy at having something in the lady's own hand —for his intermediary had chosen not to recopy it. “Do you think that if I die for love...?” * he sent back. She did not think it a very well-chosen allusion, and what followed was embarrassing, in view of the fact that she had not expected the woman to pass on her words verbatim:

“How true. We live, we die, not as we ask,

And I must die without that one word'sad.'

“I would hurry to my grave if I thought I might have it there.”

She had only the prettiest and most graceful of attendants. The ceremonies were as elaborate as if she were being presented to the reigning emperor. It was late in the night when the procession, having first looked in on Tamakazura's sister, proceeded to the Reizei emperor's apartments. Akikonomu and the ladies-in-waiting had all grown old in his service, and now there was a beautiful lady at her youthful best. No one was surprised that the emperor doted upon her and that she was soon the most conspicuous lady in the Reizei household. The Reizei emperor behaved like any other husband, and that, people said, was quite as it should be. He had hoped to see a little of Tamakazura and was disappointed that she withdrew after a brief conversation.