Lights were glimpsing from the Fujinami mansion; more lights were visible among the shrubberies below.  This soft light, filtered through the paper walls, shone like a luminous pearl.  This is the home light of the Japanese, and is as typical of their domesticity as the blazing log-fire is of ours.  It is greenish, still and pure, like a glow-worm’s beacon.

Out of the deep silence a bell tolled.  It was as though an unseen hand had struck the splendour of that metallic firmament; or as though a voice had spoken out of the sunset cloud.

The two girls descended to the brink of the lake.  Here at the farther end the water was broader; and it was hidden from view of the houses.  Green reeds grew along the margin, and green iris leaves, like sword blades, black now in the failing light.  There was a studied roughness in the tiny landscape, and in the midst of the wilderness a little hut.

“What a sweet little summer-house!” cried Asako.

It looked like a settler’s shack, built of rough, unshapen logs and thatched with rushes.

“It is the room for the chanoyu, the tea-ceremony,” said her cousin.

Inside, the walls were daubed with earth; and a round window barred with bamboo sticks gave a view into what was apparently forest depths.

“Why, it is just like a doll’s house,” cried Asako, delighted.  “Can we go in?”

“Oh, yes,” said the Japanese.  Asako jumped in at once and squatted down on the clean matting; but her 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.”