I stretched sleepily, and wondered vaguely what they were doing in England, and whether my estimable, though trying, sister Lou (fashionable to her finger-tips) had cajoled my unfortunate brother-in-law into changing her last year’s set of furs for “something a little more the thing, don’t you know, Stanmere.”
Mousmé requires no furs. Her wants are few. A piece of silk with wonderful patterns over it—birds which seem to fly, irises whose vivid tints almost make unaccustomed eyes ache, and chrysanthemums which one could swear nod upon their slender, almost leafless stalks—which she fashions into a robe of delight. A few jade and lacquer pins for her wonderful jet-black hair. Some new tabi. Long white digitated stockings reaching above her dimpled knees. A sash to make her girl acquaintances and married brother’s wife jealous. And so you have the costume in which she is prepared to receive her visitors and to glide with a soothing shish-shish over the white matting of the floor and through the comically narrow passages.
The mail arrived yesterday week, and down at Kotmasu’s office I found Lou’s usual parcel of New Year’s gifts. For me there were several new novels—the pictures in which will cause Mousmé to wonder and open her almond eyes wide, with the little trick of quivering the lids which she has—some papers, tobacco—five pounds of it in a sealed tin (a good soul is Stanmere)—a shaving tidy worked by Irene in some mysterious stitch which seems to have come into fashion since I scorned crewel-work anti-macassars with lace frills that hung on the back buttons of one’s coat, turning one at afternoon tea into an object of interest and amusement.
For Mousmé there was a Paris hat (Lou will never, I fear, realise that Paris fashions have as yet little interest for Nagasaki belles), in which Mousmé’s piquant face would be smothered and turned to no account, a silk tea-gown which she will wear with the dignity becoming five feet one inch and a half of really married Japanese womanhood.
There was also something more.
My present, which I have had sent out from the Compagnie des Fondants Parisiens—a huge box of the best confectionery that money could buy. I knew that Mousmé would like this better than anything else, and that for the time the native teriyaki and such-like sugar-coated joys would be nowhere.
All the presents are in the little room I use as a study—a room into which Mousmé creeps with awe. It is (to her untutored mind) so full of books and mysterious writings.
I had risen and was gazing out over the harbour, which lay below me veiled in a gauze-like, opalescent haze, when the farther paper-panelled door was slid softly back in its groove, and Mousmé entered.