Mr. Hancock laughed. "Well--you try. We'll get some broom or something, and you shall try your hand. You'd better read the article. Look here--they've got names for all the angles.... 'Shin'--he read with amused admiring delight, 'sho-shin' ... there's no end of it." Miriam fired and hesitated. "It's like a sort of mathematics.... I'm no good at mathematics." "I expect you could get very good results ... we'll try. They carry it to such extraordinary lengths because there's all sorts of social etiquette mixed up with it--you can't have a branch pointing at a guest for instance--it would be rude." "No wonder it takes them years" said Miriam. They laughed together, moving vaguely about the room. Mr. Hancock looked thoughtfully at the celluloid tray of hairpins on the mantelshelf, and blew the dust from it ... there was something she remembered in some paper, very forcibly written, about the falsity of introducing single specimens of Japanese art, the last results of centuries of an artistic discipline, that was it, that had grown from the life of a secluded people living isolated in a particular spot under certain social and natural conditions, into English household decoration.... "Gleanings in Buddha Fields" the sun on rice-fields ... and Fujiama--Fuji-no-San in the distance ... but he did not like Hearn--"there's something in the chap that puts me off" ... puts off--what a good phrase ... "something sensuous in him" ... but you could never forget Buddha Fields. It made you know you were in Japan, in the picture of Japan ... and somebody had said that all good art, all great art, had a sensuous element ... it was dreadful, but probably true ... because the man had observed it and was not an artist, but somebody looking carefully on. Mr. Hancock, Englishman, was "put off" by sensuousness, by anybody taking a delight in the sun on rice fields and the gay colours of Japan ... perhaps one ought to be "put off" by Hearn ... but Mr. Hancock liked Japanese things and bought them and put them in with his English things, that looked funny and tame beside them. What he did not like was the expression of delight. It was queer and annoying somehow ... especially as he said that the way English women were trained to suppress their feelings was bad. He had theories and fixed preferences and yet always seemed to be puzzled about so many things. "D'you think it right to try to introduce single pieces of Japanese art into English surroundings?" she said tartly, beginning on the instruments. "East is East and West is West and never the twain can meet?" "That's a dreadful idea--I don't believe it a bit."