of each day, in this
little haven of coming joy.

A secluded room was fitted up as a studio, for his sole use. Here were
great rectangles of paper, rolls of thin silk, stretching frames, water
holders, multitudinous brushes, and all the exquisite pigment that
Japanese love of beauty has drawn from water, earth, and air; delicate
infusions of sea-moss, roots, and leaves, saucers of warm earth ground to
a paste, precious vessels of powdered malachite, porphyry, and lapis
lazuli. But the boy looked askance upon the expensive outlay. His wild
nature resented so obvious a lure. It seemed unworthy of a Dragon
Painter to accept this multitude of material devices. He had painted on
flakes of inner bark, still quivering with the life from which he had
rudely torn them. Visions limned on rock and sand had been the more
precious for their impermanence. Here, every stroke was to be recorded,
each passing whim and mood registered, as in a book of fate.

For days the little workroom remained immaculate. Kano began to fret.
Ando Uchida, the wise, said, "Wait." It was Mata who finally
precipitated the crisis. One rainy morning, being already in an ill
humor over some trifling household affair, she was startled and annoyed
by the sudden vision of Tatsu's head thrust noiselessly into her kitchen.
Rudely she had slammed the shoji together, calling out to him that he had
better be off doing the one thing he was fit to do, rather than to be
skulking around her special domain. Tatsu had, as rudely, reopened the
shoji panels, tearing a large hole in the translucent paper. "He had
come merely for a glimpse of the Dragon Maid," he told the angry dame.
"In a few days more she was to be his wife, and this maddening convention
of keeping him always from her was eating out his vitals with red fire,"
so declared Tatsu, and let the consuming passion blaze in his sunken eyes.

But Mata, undismayed, stood up in scornful silence. She was gathering
herself together like a storm, and in an instant more had hurled upon him
the full terror of her vocabulary. She called him a barbarian, a
mountain goat,--a Tengu,--better mated to a fox spirit or a she-demon
than to a decent girl like her young mistress. She denounced her
erstwhile beloved master as a blind old dotard, and the idolized Ume, she
declared a weak and yielding idiot. Tatsu's attempts at retort were
swept away with a hiss. For a while he raged like a flame upon the
doorstep, but