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162 answer to your prayers that all this has happened to me. I only regret that, since you must all the time have been aware of this, you did not think fit to tell me about it a little sooner. Since I left the City I have been so much obsessed by the uncertainty of human life that I have felt no inclination towards any save religious employments. I am now so worn out by months of penance and fasting that no worldly impulse or desire is left in any corner of my being. I had indeed been told long ago that a grown-up daughter lived here with you; but I knew nothing more, and assumed that the society of a disgraced and exiled man could only be distasteful to one of her birth and breeding. But since you thus encourage me, I ask for nothing better than to make her acquaintance as soon as possible. I do not doubt that her company will prove a solace to my loneliness.’ His prompt acceptance was more than the old man had dared to expect and in high delight he answered with the verse: ‘You too have learnt to know it, the loneliness of night upon Akashi shore, when hour and listless hour must yet be filled before the dawn can come.’ ‘And when you consider the anxiety in which I have for all these years been living…’, the old man added: and though he trembled somewhat affectedly at the recollection of what he had been through, Genji was willing to concede that to have lived all one’s life in such a place must indeed have been very disagreeable. However he would not be too sympathetic and answered: ‘You at any rate have the advantage of being used to the coast…’, and he recited the poem: ‘What know you of sorrow, who wear not the traveller’s cloak, nor on an unaccustomed pillow rest, groping for dreams till dawn?’ For the first time Genji was treating him without the slightest formality or reserve. In his gratitude and admiration the old man poured out an endless stream of inconsequent but flattering remarks,