her's hearts; but outside of personal knowledge, there are race
tendencies difficult to understand."

CHAPTER XVIII
THE KATCHIU-YASHIKI

"The real charm of woman in herself is that which comes after
the first emotion of passionate love has died away, when all
illusions fade to reveal a reality lovelier than any illusion
which has been evolved behind the phantom curtain of them.
And again marriage seems to me a certain destruction of all
emotion and suffering. So that afterwards one looks back at
the old times with wonder. One cannot dream or desire
anything more after love is transmuted into marriage. It is
like a haven from which you can see currents rushing like
violet bands beyond you out of sight. It seems to me (though
I am a poor judge of such matters) that it does not make a
man any happier to have an intellectual wife, unless he
marries for society. The less intellectual, the more capable,
so long as there is neither coarseness nor foolishness; for
intellectual converse a man can't really have with women.
Woman is antagonistic to it. An emotional truth is quite as
plain to the childish mind, as to the mind of Herbert Spencer
or of Clifford. The child and the God come equally near to
the Eternal truth. But then marriage in a complex
civilisation is really a terrible problem; there are so many
questions involved."

As summer advanced Hearn found his little two-storeyed house by the
Ohasigawa--although dainty as a birdcage--too cramped for comfort, the
rooms being scarcely higher than steamship cabins, and so narrow that
ordinary mosquito nets could not be suspended across them.

On the summit of the hill above Matsue stood the ancient castle of the
former daimyo of the province. In feudal days, when the city was under
military sway, the finest homesteads of the Samurai clustered round its
Cyclopean granite walls; now owing to changed conditions and the
straitened means of their owners, many of these _Katchiu-yashiki_ were
untenanted. Hearn and his wife were lucky enough to secure one. Though
he no longer had his outlook over the lake, with the daily coming and
going of fishing-boats and sampans, he had an extended view of the city
and was close to the university. But above all he found compensation in
the spacious Japanese garden, outcome of ce