Read it through once

He also paid a brief visit to Utsusemi, now turned nun. She had installed herself in apartments so utterly devoid of ornament or personal touches of any kind that they had the character of official waiting-rooms. The only conspicuous object which they contained was a large statue of Buddha, and Genji was lamenting to himself that sombre piety, to the exclusion of all other interest, should have possessed so gracious and gentle a spirit, when he noticed that the decoration of her prayer-books, the laying of her altar with its dishes of floating petals—these and many another small sign of elegance seemed to betray a heart that was not yet utterly crushed by the severities of religion. Her blue-grey curtains-of-state showed much taste and care. She sat so far back as scarcely to be seen. But one touch of colour stood out amid the gloom; the long sleeves of the gay coat he had sent her showed beneath her mantle of grey, and moved by her acceptance of this token he said with tears in his eyes: ‘I know that I ought not now even to remember how once I felt towards you. But from the beginning our love brought to us only irritation and misery. It is as well that, if we are to be friends at all, it must now be in a very different way.’ She too was deeply moved and said at last: ‘How can I doubt your good will towards me, seeing at what pains you have been to provide for me, protect me.... I should be ungrateful indeed....’ ‘I daresay many another lover suffered just as I did,’ he said, attempting a lighter tone; ‘and Buddha condemns you to your present life as a penance for all the hearts you have broken. And how the others must have suffered if their experience was anything like mine! Not once but over and over again did I fall in love with you; and those others.... There, I knew that I was right. You are thinking, I am sure, of an entanglement beside which our escapade pales into insignificance.’ His only intention was to divert the conversation from their own relationship, and he was speaking quite at random. But she instantly imagined that he had in some circuitous way got wind of that terrible story ...[130] and blushing she said in a low voice: ‘Do not remind me of it. The mere fact that you should have been told of it is punishment enough ...’ and she burst into tears.