I have neither mother nor father to reckon with. But I have a sister Lou, who, alas, is a dragon of propriety (and I am no St. George), who will, I fear, never realise that my wife is not an abstraction off a paper screen or a lacquer tray.
But then, after all, she will be my wife, and because she is pretty and “strange”—I fancy that’s what Lou will call her—she may succeed in a society which, like the Athenians, is always running after some new thing. The latest “craze” is to my mind like a glass of sherbet. It creates the greatest amount of stir for the least space of time.
Not even thoughts of Lou, who is the pink of propriety—why isn’t impropriety dubbed pink?—can terrify me from my purpose, because I am in love. I never felt so unafraid of Lou, her tongue and her smile, in all my life, even at the distance of many thousand miles, and I conclude therefrom that I must be terribly in earnest. As for the others, I don’t care.
They have pleased themselves, have married as they wished, and surely may be reasonably expected to let me do the same, I argue.
My house, which seemed complete enough before, now appears only to require Miss Hyacinth’s presence to make it all it should be.
I am very critical, but I can scarcely find anything to alter in my little home. My rooms at Cambridge, ere every one went in for Art—with a big A—talked Art, dreamed Art, abused Art, and outraged Art—were considered artistic, and my chambers in St. James’ Street the same. It is in me, and has cropped out in many of the little details of my Japanese home. Clever and appreciative workmen and artificers have enabled me to see my desires carried into effect.
I play at having tea—imagining the while how the little white room, which is rather bare for European taste perhaps, but so clean, airy and spotless, will look with Mousmé in it; and then I go out on the verandah to wait till Kotmasu comes.