er more cautious cousin dusted the
place with her handkerchief before risking a stain.

"Do you often have tea-ceremonies?" asked Asako.

The Muratas had explained to her long ago something about the
mysterious rites.

"Two or three times in the Spring, and then two or three times in the
Autumn. But my teacher comes every week."

"How long have you been learning?" Asako wanted to know.

"Oh, since I was ten years old about."

"Is it so difficult then?" said Asako, who had found it comparatively
easy to pour out a cup of drawing-room tea without clumsiness.

Sadako smiled tolerantly at her cousin's naive ignorance of things
aesthetic and intellectual. It was as though she had been asked
whether music or philosophy were difficult.

"One can never study too much," she said, "one is always learning; one
can never be perfect. Life is short, art is long."

"But it is not an art like painting or playing the piano, just pouring
out tea?"

"Oh, yes," Sadako smiled again, "it is much more than that. We
Japanese do not think art is just to be able to do things, showing
off like _geisha_. Art is in the character, in the spirit. And
the tea-ceremony teaches us to make our character full of art, by
restraining everything ugly and common, in every movement, in the
movement of our hands, in the position of our feet, in the looks of
our faces. Men and women ought not to sit and move like animals; but
the shape of their bodies, and their way of action ought to express a
poetry. That is the art of the _chanoyu_."

"I should like to see it," said Asako, excited by her cousin's
enthusiasm, though she hardly understood a word of what she had been
saying.

"You ought to learn some of it," said Sadako, with the zeal of a
propagandist. "My teacher says--and my teacher was educated at the
court of the Tokugawa Shogun--that no woman can have really good
manners, if she has not studied the _chanoyu_."

Of course, there was nothing which Asako would like more than to sit
in this fascinating arbour in the warm days of the coming summer,
and play at tea-parties with her new-found Japanese cousin. She would
learn to speak Japanese, too; and she would help Sadako with her
French and English.

The two cousins worked out the scheme for their future intimacy until
the stars were reflected in the lake and the evening breeze became too
cool for them.

Then they left the little hermitage and continued their walk around
the garden. They p