Hush. You speak unbecomingly.
Excuse me. I have only your ladyships best interests at heart.
It were more like it, I trow, had you said in mind, my good Ishida.
No less at my fingers end, your ladyship.
Boaster—one might think you Sen-no-rikyu himself, to hear you talk.
Stranger mistakes have been made.
Not to-day, Ishida.
Yodogima—
Stop! You forget yourself; the taiko still lives: it is he that we serve.
The festal day coming on, and all in readiness, Sen-no-rikyu apparently took his place at the bowl. No man had greater fame than he. There had been brewers of a superior flavor, but none ever reached the excellence of Hideyoshis day and favor, save Sen-no-rikyu, and he alone. Famed as no man had been at cha-no-yu, trusted as only a Hideyoshi knew how to trust, truant or designer, patronized by an age famed above all others in the wealth and luxury and refinement and indulgence of a nobility unsurpassed in the annals of time, this, the supposed Sen-no-rikyu, but in fact substitute tea-server, a scion of all that had gone before and a deceiver among adepts, may have rightly thought himself, too, a master, undiscovered and immune.