plainly how far she had fallen from the days when her antechambers were thronged by the fashionable world. True, her name was still widely known and even reverenced in the country at large; but this was small consolation for the fact that her own son, Tō no Chūjō, had for some time past been far from cordial in his manner towards her. It was very good of Yūgiri to come on such an evening. But why was it that he looked so thoughtful? Perhaps the noise of the hurricane distracted him. It was certainly very alarming.
If Yūgiri fell into a meditative mood in this house, it was generally with memories of his little playmate[1] that his mind was employed. But to-night he had not, as a matter of fact, thought of her once; nor did the tempest disturb him. It was the face he had seen this morning, in the course of his unintended eavesdropping, which now continually haunted him, till he suddenly checked his imagination and asked himself remorsefully what had come over him that in this of all places another face than Kumoi’s should have filled his thoughts during a whole evening. And if it was a crime in him that he should presume to court Tō no Chūjō’s daughter, what view would his elders take if they should discover that he spent his leisure in thinking of Genji’s wife? He tried hard to think of other things; but after a moment or two the recollection of what he had seen that morning sprang back into his mind. Was all this a mere aberration on his part? He could not believe it; surely her beauty was indisputably of the kind that occurs only once or twice in a century—that a whole epoch may utterly lack? There was nothing to be wondered at in the impression which the sight of her had made upon him; if there was anything strange in the matter at all, it was that Genji, having such a wife as this, could ever have
- ↑ Kumoi.
