with what she has already done, the merest trifle, and so soon as we are all more comfortably settled…’ Thus her friends encouraged her. But, whether she accepted his invitation or not, civility demanded that she must at least reply to his poem. She knew that he would regard her cadences and handwriting very critically, expecting something hopelessly countrified and out-of-date. This made the framing of an answer all the more embarrassing. She chose a Chinese paper, very heavily scented. ‘Some fault there must be in the stem of this marsh-flower. Else it had not been left unheeded amid the miry meadows by the sea.’ Such was her poem. It was written in rather faint ink and Genji, as he eagerly scanned it, thought the hand lacking in force and decision. But there was breeding and distinction in it, more indeed than he had dared to look for; and on the whole he felt much relieved.
The next thing was to decide in what part of the house she was to live. In Murasaki’s southern wing there was not a room to spare. The Empress Akikonomu was obliged by her rank to live in considerable state. Etiquette forbade that she should ever appear without a numerous train of followers, and her suite had been designed to accommodate an almost indefinite number of gentlewomen. There was plenty of room for Tamakatsura here; but in such quarters she would tend to become lost amid the horde of Akikonomu’s gentlewomen, and to put her in such a place at all would indeed seem as though he expected her to assist in waiting upon the Empress. The only considerable free space in the house was the wing which he had built to contain his official papers. These had for the most part been handed over to Tō no Chūjō, and what was still left could easily be housed elsewhere. The advantage of those quarters was that Tamakatsura would here be the close neighbour of the Lady from the Village of Falling Flowers, whose
