I soon have my sprigs of gardenias mingled with the roses, and I return to the house, hoping to lay my offering by Mousmé’s side ere she awakes.
I enter the strangely bare bedroom, with its gray panels and vermilion storks, from the verandah. A queer old idol, belonging to the former owner of the house, grins—there is no other word for an accurate description—benign approval from its pedestal in the corner. I had retained it because it filled a niche; because I have rather a penchant for curios; and lastly, because, as an irrepressible midshipman nephew once put it, “It’s the jolliest-looking old idol I’ve ever seen—a combination of J. L. Toole and Madame Blavatsky.”
Mousmé is still asleep when I enter, but the creaky floor awakes her ere I have half crossed it. She rubs her eyes in a somewhat bewildered fashion, and then with a smile promptly buries her little retroussé nose in the posy I have brought.
Then she rises from the mattress-like bed, a blue linen gowned little figure with tiny bare feet, and nails on them like rose leaves, and trots across the matting floor to a position in front of our improvised dressing-table.
She peers into the glass anxiously to see whether her slumbers have disturbed her hair, touches the thick, neatly-arranged plaits with deft fingers on either side of her smiling face, and then laughs at my amusement.
Mousmé’s toilet is a very simple matter. She has few garments to put on, no hair to do, or rather no hair which wants doing, her elaborate coiffure being a permanent erection for some considerable time. She tells me that it took “nearly a large day to do it,” and I quite believe her; it is such a wonderful erection.
All is so delightfully simple. She puts on her little patches of rouge—with a less reckless hand, in deference to my opinions on the subject—in a trice, puffs some white powder upon her cheeks and charmingly impudent nose, reddens her lips with the certitude of a practised hand, slips into her gown of flowered silk, and with a pretty little pleading moue entreats me to tie the enormous bow of her brilliantly coloured obi; and hey, presto! as the conjurer says, almost in less time than it takes a Western woman to put on her bonnet, Mousmé’s toilet is complete, and she is ready for our make-believe playing at breakfast.
She eats her sugared plums with dainty grace, and drinks an astonishing number of cups of pale amber-coloured tea; but then the cups are so small that her doing so provokes little wonder in my mind. She has, perhaps, a misgiving that she has eaten more than I can afford, although I overheard my mother-in-law telling her that I was a very rich man; for she says, interrogatively, “I eat too great velly much? Not eat so again?”
I smilingly assure her that she is to eat as much as she can, and she laughs and gets up to attend to the flowers on the verandah, and place fresh blossoms in the blue china bowls which stand on eccentric perches on the walls, in the corners of the room, on a bamboo and lacquer cabinet, and on my English-pattern knee-hole writing-table in the window.
Mousmé has deft fingers and good taste, and the flowers seem to arrange themselves in negligently artistic masses beneath her touch.