were not blackened, but her eyebrows were delicately touched with stain. ‘Why, when I might be playing with a beautiful child, do I spend my time with an ugly woman? ‘Genji kept on asking himself in bewilderment while they sat together playing with her dolls. Next she began to draw pictures and colour them. After she had painted all sorts of queer and amusing things, ‘Now I am going to do a picture for you,’ said Genji and drawing a lady with very long hair he put a dab of red on her nose. Even in a picture, he thought pausing to look at the effect, it gave one a most uncomfortable feeling. He went and looked at himself in the mirror and as though dissatisfied with his own fresh complexion he suddenly put on his own nose a dab of red such as he had given to the lady in the picture. He looked at himself in the mirror. His handsome face had in an instant become ridiculous and repulsive. At first the child laughed. ‘Should you go on liking me if I were always as ugly as this?’ he asked. Suddenly she began to be afraid that the paint would not come off. ‘Oh why did you do it?’ she cried. ‘How horrible!’ He pretended to rub it without effect. ‘No,’ he said ruefully, ‘it will not come off. What a sad end to our game! I wonder what the Emperor will say when I go back to the Palace?’ He said it so seriously that she became very unhappy, and longing to cure him dipped a piece of thick soft paper in the water-jug which stood by his writing-things, and began scrubbing at his nose. ‘Take care,’ he cried laughing, ‘that you do not serve me as Heichū93 was treated by his lady. I would rather have a red nose than a black one.’ So they passed their time, making the prettiest couple.
In the gentle spring sunshine the trees were already shimmering with a haze of new-grown buds. Among them it was the plum-trees that gave the surest promise, for already their blossoms were uncurling, like lips parted in a faint smile. Earliest of them all was a red plum that grew beside the covered steps. It was in full colour. ‘Though fair the tree on which it blooms, this red flower fills me with a strange misgiving,’94 sang Genji with a deep sigh.