“Why?”
“Because you’re much prettier as you are.”
Mousmé smiles contentedly, and pats my big hand, which looks so very large beside hers, and rambles off to tell me of a lizard she found in our bed just before I came back from the town; whilst I, glancing over the pages of one of the magazines, divide my attention between her story and a critique of Robert Elsmere.
The time passes very quickly with Mousmé; she is soon tired of looking at books and papers which, at present, she only half understands; and lest she should interrupt me, she gets up, and goes with a hushed pad, pad of her shoeless feet into our bedroom, to fetch a strange little lacquer box which contains her writing materials. A flat shell, with lovely mother-of-pearl tints on its nacre hollow, in which she grinds her Indian ink; the fine paintbrush, which plays the part of pen; the flimsy rice-paper, in long, thin strips, and envelopes to match, are among her belongings, and are decorated with tiny pictures of trees and strangely grotesque animals, birds and fishes. She is going to write to her mother, to ask her to send up a sash of turquoise-blue silk which was left behind when she was married, and which she has found out I admired.
I watch her as she writes, her head bent over her paper, and the lower half of her face in shadow—such a scrap of daintily dressed femininity.
I wonder what else she is saying—women’s inter-confidences are always so distressing and perplexing to a man—for she has already covered one long strip with delicately minute writing, which at a little distance looks like the ground-plan of an intricate maze; and surely even a turquoise silk obi cannot call for such a lengthy description, except, perhaps, in a Parisian fashion-journal.
She has finished by the time I have cut the pages of one of the novels Lou has included in the parcel; and, with a solemnity worthy of the best traditions of the Japanese official, she seals it up securely in an envelope of whitey-blue rice-paper—so small, that it necessitates the folding of the letter half a dozen times.
One of the ever-amiable Oka’s almost innumerable children, a quaint toddler of five, with a queer, shaven head, with its little ebon queue, and small, bright, black beads of eyes, is easily persuaded to take it down to Mousmé’s mother for a couple of sen.
Then we have tea.
Really it is a sort of dinner, a nondescript meal best conveyed to the mind by that equally nondescript English phrase, “high tea”—a strange meal indulged in by people who are too hungry to have tea, and too modest to have a second dinner.