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Hers was a graceful figure; but her expression was spoiled by the blue-tinted spectacles which completely hid her features. "Miss Sadako Fujinami, daughter of Mr. Fujinami Gentaro," said Ito. "She has been University undergraduate, and she speaks English quite well." Miss Sadako bowed three times. Then she said, "How do you do" in a high unnatural voice.
She longed to acquire that tranquillity of deportment, that slow graceful poise of hand and arm, that low measured speech. When the teacher had gone, she began to mimic her gestures with all the seriousness of appreciative imitation. Sadako laughed. She supposed that her cousin was fooling. Asako thought that she was amused by her clumsiness. "I shall never be able to do it," she sighed.
She was tired of hotel life; and she turned for relaxation to playing at Japan with cousin Sadako, just as her husband turned to tennis. Her favourite haunt was the little tea-house among the reeds at the edge of the lake, which seemed so hidden from everywhere. Here the two girls practised their languages. Here they tried on each others clothes, and talked about their lives and purposes.
She was going to tell him all about her mother's picture; but she suddenly checked herself, and said instead, "They've got such a lovely garden." She described the home of the cousins in glowing colours, the hospitality of the family, the cleverness of cousin Sadako, and the lessons which they were going to exchange.
"The English lose too many prisoners; Japanese soldiers are never taken prisoner." "When the Japanese general ordered the attack on Tsingtao, the English regiment ran away!" Cousin Sadako announced her intention of studying German. "Nobody will speak English now," she said. "The English are disgraced. They cannot fight."
They thought that she would make him more gentle. But she died; and then he became more sad than before." Asako was crying very gently. She felt the touch of her cousin's hand on her arm. The intellectual Miss Sadako also was weeping, the tears furrowing her whitened complexion. The Japanese are a very emotional race.
All the guests were manipulating their chop-sticks. Geoffrey raised his own pair. The two slender rods of wood were unparted at one end to show that they had never been used. It was therefore necessary to pull them in two. As he did so a tiny splinter of wood like a match fell from between them. Asako laughed. "That is the toothpick," cousin Sadako explained.
Her cousin, Asako, by the mere luck of having had an eccentric parent and a European upbringing, possessed all the advantages and all the experience which the Japanese girl knew only through the glamorous medium of books. But this Asa San was a fool. Sadako had found that out at once in the course of a few minutes talk at the Maple Club dinner.
Sadako was given to understand the part which she was to play in alienating her cousin's affections from the foreigner. She was to harp on the faithlessness of men in general, and on husbands in particular, and on the importance of money values in matrimonial considerations. She was to suggest that a foreign man would never choose a Japanese bride merely for love of her.
"Oh, no!" cried cousin Sadako; "do not go near to them. Do not touch them. They are lepers." Some of them had no arms, or had mere stumps ending abruptly in a red and sickening object like a bone which a dog has been chewing. Some had no legs, and were pulled along on little wheeled trolleys by their less dilapidated companions in misfortune. Some had no features.
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