ast, by self-destruction?

In such wise did the old servant fret and ponder, but no assurance
came. A true insight into art might have opened many doors to her.
Yet, through a life devoted to the externals of it, Mata had been
tolerant of beauty, rather than at one with it. The impractical view
of life which art seemed to demand of its devotees was enough to arouse
suspicion, if not her actual dislike. Uchida was a hero because he had
been bold enough to shake himself free from lethargic influences, and
achieve a shining and substantial success.

But even had the key of art been thrust into the old dame's groping
hand, and even had her master guided her, there was an inner chamber of
Ume's heart which they could not have found. Ume herself had not known
of it until that first instant when, now three weeks ago, a strange
young face, hung about with shadows, had peered into her father's gate.
With the first sound of his voice, she had entered in, had knelt before
a shrine whereon, wrapped in fire, a Secret lay. Ever since she had
needed to guard that shrine, not, indeed, for fear that the light would
falter, but rather that it might not leap up, and lay waste her being.
As one guards a flame, so Ume-ko, with silence and prayer and
self-enforced tranquillity, guarded the sacred spark from winds of
passion. Each day at dawn, and again at twilight of each day, it
flamed high and was hard to conquer, for with dawn a letter was
hers--held in the night-wet branches of her dragon-plum, and each night
when Mata and her father thought her sleeping, an answer was written,
and committed to the keeping of the tree.

When Tatsu did not paint, or rest from sheer exhaustion, he was
writing. Ume, bending above his words, shivering at times, or weeping,
marvelled that the tissue had not charred beneath the thoughts burned
into it. Tatsu's phrases were like his paintings, unusual, vital,
almost demoniac in force, shot through and through at times with the
bolt of an almost unbearable beauty. Her own words answered his, as
the tree-tops answer storm, with music. Verse alone could ease the
girl of her ecstacy, and each recorded and triumphed in the demolition
of yet another day. "Another stone, beloved, thrust down from the
dungeon wall that severs us!"

Swiftly the heap of wedding garments grew. There were delicate
kimonos, as thin and gray as mist, with sunset-colored inner robes of
silk; gowns of linen and cotton for indoo