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Updated: June 8, 2025
His wife had certainly made a great abdication when she abandoned her native dress for plain blue serges. Of course he could not have Asako looking like a doll; but still had he fallen in love with a few yards of silk?
Asako no longer felt like a Japanese. The sight of her countrymen in their drab monotonous thousands sickened her. The hiss and cackle of their incomprehensible tongue beat upon her brain with a deadly incessant sound, like raindrops to one who is impatiently awaiting the return of fine weather. Here at Ikégami, the distant view of the sea and the Yokohama shipping invited Asako to escape.
She was sweet, gentle and innocent; far more Japanese, indeed, than her sophisticated cousin. It was a type which was becoming rare in her own country. Little Asako had nothing in common with the argumentative heroines of Bernard Shaw or with the desperate viragos of Ibsen, to whom Sadako felt herself spiritually akin. Asako must be a fool.
From time to time the haze over the mind began to clear; and Asako seemed to look down upon the scene around her from a great height. There was a long room, so long that she could not see the end of it, and rows of narrow beds, and nurses, dressed in white with high caps like bishops' mitres, who appeared and disappeared. Sometimes they would speak to her and she would answer.
Sometimes a low whistle sounded from outside the house. Sadako would lay aside the book, would slip on her cloak and go out into the garden, where Sekiné was waiting for her. When she was left to herself Asako began to think for the first time in her life.
She envied her money, her freedom, and her frank happiness. She had often pondered about the ways of Japanese husbands and wives; and the more she thought over the subject, the more she envied Asako her happy married life. She envied her with a woman's envy, which seeks to hurt and spoil.
A few women, in charge of children or market-baskets, stared blankly. "Why, they are wearing kimonos!" exclaimed Asako, "but how dirty and dusty they are. They look as though they had been sleeping in them!" The Japanese women, indeed, cling to their national dress. But to the Barringtons, landing at Nagasaki, they seemed ugly, shapeless and dingy. Their hair was greasy and unkempt.
For the first time during the journey of their married lives, Geoffrey and Asako were pursuing different paths. It is the normal thing, no doubt, for the man to go out to his work and to his play, while the wife attends to her social and domestic duties. The evening brings reunion with new impressions and new interests to discuss. Such a life with its brief restorative separations prevents love growing stale, and soothes the irritation of nerves which, by the strain of petty repetitions, are exasperated sometimes into blasphemy of the heart's true creed. But the Barrington ménage was an unusual one. By adopting a life of travel, they had devoted themselves to a protracted honeymoon, a relentless tête-
Only in the evenings a sense of insecurity rose with the river mists, and a memory of Sadako's warning shivered through the lonely room with the bitter cold of the winter air. It was then that Asako felt for the little dagger resting hidden in her bosom just as Sadako had shown her how to wear it.
She had long ago decided that the gods of the Japanese and the korrigans of her own country were intimately related. She had served Asako since before her marriage, and would have remained with her until death. She was desperately faithful. But she could not follow her mistress to the Fujinami house and risk her soul's salvation. "Monsieur le capitaine go away, and madame very, very unhappy.
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