He turned to the table and took up the uppermost of the pile.
“There’s a lovely green picture” said Miriam, “at least I like it.”
Mr. Hancock turned pages ruminatively.
“Those are good things” he said flattening the open page.
“Japanese flower Decorations” read Miriam looking at the reproduced squares of flowering branches arranged with a curious naturalness in strange flat dishes. They fascinated her at once—stiff and real, shooting straight up from the earth and branching out. They seemed coloured. She turned pages and gazed.
“How nice and queer.”
Mr. Hancock bent smiling. “They’ve got a whole science of this you know” he said; “it takes them years to learn it; they apprentice themselves and study for years....”
Miriam looked incredulously at the simple effects—just branches placed “artistically” in flat dishes and fixed somehow at the base amongst little heaps of stones.
“It looks easy enough.”
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.”