THREE:"There is an interesting display of the natural products of Japan, and it is exceedingly instructive to a stranger. The Japanese are studying these things with great attention, and the fair will undoubtedly prove an excellent school for the people by adding to their stock of information about themselves. Each section bears over its entrance the name of the city, province, or district it represents, and as these names are displayed in English as well as in Japanese, a stranger has no difficulty in finding out the products of the different parts of the empire. The result is that many articles are repeated in the exhibition, and you meet with them again and again. Such, for example, are raw silks, which come from various localities, as likewise do articles of leather, wood, and iron. Porcelain of various kinds appears repeatedly, and so do the woods used for making furniture. There is an excellent show of porcelain, and some of the pieces are of enormous size. Kaga, Satsuma, Hizen, Kioto, Nagasaki, and other wares are in abundance, and a student of ceramics will find enough to interest him for many hours.It will reproduce all pictures certainly by him, she said, and a quantity of his sketches, with his drawings of flying machines, the Venice ones, you know. It will be published to subscribers only.
THREE:"The curious feature of the revolution which established the Mikado on his throne, and made him the ruler of the whole country is thisthat[Pg 98] the movement was undertaken to prevent the very things it has brought about."Alice sat down again by the fire, and picked up a piece of buttered bun with a semicircular bite out of it which had fallen on the carpet. He must have been in the middle of that mastication when the fiasco began.... Yet, he could not have been, for he had begun to smoke. Perhaps he took another bun after he had finished his cigarette.... She considered this with a detached curiosity; it seemed to occupy all her mind. Then the boy covered with buttons came in to remove the tea-tray, and she noticed he had a piece of sticking plaster in the middle of his forehead. That was interesting too and curious.... And then she had a firm, an absolute conviction that Mr Silverdale had not gone away, that he was waiting in the hall, unable to tear himself from{213} her, and yet forbidden by his pride to come back. He had only left the room a couple of minutes; and surely she would find him seated in one of the Gothic chairs in the hall, with his hand over his face. She must go to him; their eyes would meet, and somehow or other the awful misunderstanding and estrangement in which they had parted would melt away. He would say, Life is too strong for me; farewell the celibacy of the clergy, or something like that: or he would hold her hand for a long, a very long time, and perhaps whisper, Then blessings on the fallings out, or Whatever happens, nothing must interrupt our friendship. Perhaps the farewell to the celibacy of the clergy was an exaggerated optimism, but she would be so content, so happy with much less than that (provided always that he did not say his farewell to celibacy with Julia Fyson). She would be enraptured to continue on the old terms, now that she understood what he meant and what he did not mean. And perhaps she had spoiled it all, so that he would never again hold her hand or whisper to her, or kiss her with that sort of tender and fraternal affection as once in the vestry when she had made her guileless confession to him. It was a brother-kiss, a priest-kiss, coming almost from realms above, and now she had thrown that in his teeth. She had altogether failed to understand him, him and his friendship, his comradeship (and his pawings). In the{214} fading of her anger she longed for all that which she had thought meant so much, but which she prized now for its own sake. Surely she would find him still lingering in the hall, sorrowful and unhappy and misunderstood, but not reproachful, for he was too sublime for that. He had said he was infinitely grieved several times, and he would be great enough to forgive her. Perhaps he would be too deeply hurt to make any of those appropriate little speeches she had devised for him, and if so, the reconciliation for which already she yearned, the re-establishment of their relations on the old maudlin lines, must come from her initiative. Already with that curious passion some women have for being beaten and ill-treated, she longed to humble herself, to entreat his forgiveness.
THREE:
TWO:The ridge on which he walked declined downwards into a hollow full of sunshine flecked with shadow. A few big oak-trees stood there, still leafless, and the narrow path, with mossy banks on each side, led through a copse of hazel which had been felled the year before. The ground was covered with the fern-like leaves of wood anemones{234} and thickly tufted with the dark green spears, where in May the bluebells would seem like patches of fallen sky. It was sheltered here, and a brimstone butterfly flitted through the patches of sunlight. At the bottom of the hollow a runnel of water from some spring crossed the path, and babbled into a cup fringed with creeping ivy, and young crinkled primrose leaves. Then the path rose swiftly upwards again on the side of the next rolling billow of down, and coming towards him from it was the figure, tall and swiftly moving, of a girl. For a moment he resented the fact of any human presence here: the next he heard his heart creaking in his throat, for he saw who it was."We have seen many templesso many, in fact, that it is difficult to remember all of them. One of the most impressive is the Temple of Heaven, which has three circular roofs, one above another, and is said to be ninety-nine feet high. The tiles on the top are of porcelain of the color of a clear sky, and the intention of the builder was to imitate the vault of heaven. On the inside there are altars where sacrifices are offered to the memory of former emperors of China, and on certain occasions the emperor comes here to take part in the ceremonies.
TWO:Mr Keeling was accustomed to consider the hour or two after lunch on Sunday as the most enjoyable time in the week, for then he gave himself up to the full and uninterrupted pursuit of his hobby. None of his family ever came into his study without invitation, and since he never gave such invitation, he had no fear about being disturbed. Before now he had tried to establish with one or other of them the communication of his joy in his books: he had asked Alice into his sanctuary one Sunday, but when he had shown her an exquisitely tooled binding by Cameron, she had said, Oh, what a pretty cover! A pretty cover!... somehow Alices appreciation was more hopeless than if she had not admired it at all. Then, opening it, she had come across a slightly compromising picture of Bacchus and Ariadne, and had turned over in such a hurry she had crumpled the corner of the page. Her father hardly knew whether her maidenly confusion was not worse than the outrage on his adored volume. Stern moralist and Puritan though he was, this sort of prudery seemed to him an affectation that bordered on imbecility. On another he had asked Hugh to look at his books,{32} and Hugh had been much struck by the type of the capital letters in an edition of Omar Khayyam, wondering if it could be enlarged and used in some advertisement of the approaching summer sale at the stores. Thats the sort of type we want, he said. It hits you in the eye; that does. You cant help reading what is written in it. Very likely that was quite true, for Hugh had an excellent perception in the matter of attractive type and arrangement in the advertising department, but his father had shut up the book with a snap, feeling that it was in the nature of a profanity to let the aroma of business drift into an atmosphere incense-laden with his books. His wife presented an even more hopeless case, for she was apt to tell her friends how fond her husband was of reading, and how many new editions he had ordered for his library. Clearly, if this temple was to retain its sense of consecration he must permit no more of these infidel intruders.The boys considered a moment, and were forced to admit that, as Frank expressed it, they hadn't heard a whimper from a native infant. And they added that they were not anxious to hear any either.