Page:A Wreath of Cloud.djvu/283

Rh this way. It is extremely unsafe for a young girl to expose herself, and quite unnecessary in your case, since I have provided you with a sufficient number of attendants to mount guard on all occasions. To behave in this reckless manner is, to say the least of it, very bad form. Not that I want you to sit all day with your hands folded in front of you as though you were reciting the Spells of Fudō. I am not one of those people who think it a mark of refinement in a girl to stand on ceremony even with her everyday acquaintances and never to address a word to any one except through a barricade of curtains and screens. So far from being dignified, such a method of behaviour seems to me merely peevish and unsociable. I cannot help admiring the way in which Prince Genji is bringing up this future Empress of his. He takes no exaggerated precautions of any kind, nor does he force her talent in this direction or that; but at the same time he sees to it that there is no subject in which she remains wholly uninitiated. Thus she is able to choose intelligently for herself where other girls would be obliged merely to do as they were told. For the time it may seem that the energies of the mind have been somewhat diffused and extenuated, but in later life, given the best balanced and broadest system of education in the world, idiosyncrasies both of character and behaviour will inevitably reappear. At the present moment the Princess from Akashi is in the first and less interesting stage. I am very curious to see how she will develop when she arrives at Court.’ After these preliminaries he embarked at last upon the subject which he had really come to discuss. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘that I have not