Duncan stood up, after the servant had gone again, and bowed to me very solemnly.
“Oyasumi nasi,” he said with a stabilizing ironic smile.
“What does that mean?” I asked, doing my best to smile back at him.
“That means ‘sleep well,’” explained my husband. “But Tokudo would probably translate it into ‘Condescend to enjoy honorable tranquillity.’”
Instead of enjoying honorable tranquillity, however, I am sitting up into the wee sma’ hours of the night, patrolling the gloomy ramparts of my soul’s unrest.
Wednesday the Twenty-Third
This change to the city means a new life to my children. But I can also see it means new dangers and new influences. The simplicity of ranch life has vanished. And Dinkie and Poppsy are already getting acquainted with their neighbors. A Ford truck came within an inch of running over Poppsy this morning. She has announced a curiosity to investigate ice-cream sodas, and Dinkie has proclaimed his intention of going to the movies Saturday afternoon with Benny McArthur, the banker’s son in the next block. On Monday I’m to take my children to school. “One of the finest school-buildings in all the West,” Duncan has proudly explained. I can’t help thinking of Gershom and his little cubby-hole of a wooden building where he is even now so solemnly and yet so kind-heartedly teaching the three R’s to a gathering of little prairie outlaws.
I shall have time on my hands, I see, for Hilton and his wife, our English gardener-chauffeur and our portly maid-of-all-work, pretty well cover what the 303 wonderful Tokudo overlooks. And Tokudo is a wonder. That cat-footed little Jap does the ordering and cooking and serving; he answers the door and the telephone; he attends to the rugs and the hardwood floors; he rules over the butler’s pantry and polishes the silver and inspects the linen, and even keeps the keys to Duncan’s carefully guarded wine-cellar, which the mistress of the house herself has not yet dared to invade.