been to provide for me, protect me…. I should be ungrateful indeed….’ ‘I daresay many another lover suffered just as I did,’ he said, attempting a lighter tone; ‘and Buddha condemns you to your present life as a penance for all the hearts you have broken. And how the others must have suffered if their experience was anything like mine! Not once but over and over again did I fall in love with you; and those others… There, I knew that I was right. You are thinking, I am sure, of an entanglement beside which our escapade pales into insignificance.’ His only intention was to divert the conversation from their own relationship, and he was speaking quite at random. But she instantly imagined that he had in some circuitous way got wind of that terrible story…[1] and blushing she said in a low voice: ‘Do not remind me of it. The mere fact that you should have been told of it is punishment enough…’ and she burst into tears.
He did not know to what she referred. He had imagined that her retirement from the world was merely due to increasing depression and timidity. How was he to converse with her, if every chance remark threw her into a fit of weeping? He had no desire to go away; but he could not think of any light topic upon which to embark, and after a few general enquiries he took his leave. If only it were Lady Suyetsumu who was the nun and he could put Utsusemi in her place! So Genji thought as on his way back he again passed by the red-nosed lady’s door. He then paid short visits to the numerous other persons who lived upon his bounty, saying to such of them as he had not seen for some time: ‘If long intervals sometimes elapse between my visits to you, you must not think that my feelings towards you have changed. On the contrary, I often think what a pity it is that we so seldom meet. For
- ↑ Her relations with Ki no Kami, her stepson. See vol. ii, p. 257.
