A quaint little figure with the flush of dawn transferred to her porcelain cheeks and eyes bright with the early morning air of the scented garden; her elaborate coiffure, with its many pins, a striking contrast to the négligée of her plum-coloured kimono with its sprays of bamboo in gold thread. Against her bare little throat and dimpled shoulders she pressed a wealth of iris and lotus blooms and tender green shoots of the slenderest bamboo, her face peeping out elfish and smiling from the midst.
“These are for you, Cy-reel,” she said, laughing and casting the brilliant blossoms on to the floor in a patch of sunlight at my feet. “Now den what have you for me?”
It is difficult to resist Mousmé when she pulls one’s face down to her own smiling one, and throws slender but wonderfully tenacious little arms round one’s neck.
Mousmé, since she married, has lost some of the shyness for the “velly much rich Englishman” who had so strange a fancy as to marry her right away, and in its place has come the knowledge of certain privileges of her sex (for she knows little as yet of the “advanced” woman), and she exacts them with a pretty persistence which I find charming.
We went along the passage to the room in which are all the presents. They have been taken out of their case, and piled with masculine breadth of effect upon two low lacquer-and-bamboo settees in a corner near one of the windows.
“Oh! Oh!” exclaimed Mousmé, and then she fell down before this wonderful collection of gifts, her tiny hands fluttering over them like those of a child uncertain which thing to touch first.
Irene’s shaving tidy, the tin of tobacco sent by Stanmere, Lou’s gift of books—all these things are brushed aside, and the wonderful pale blue tea-gown is at last taken up. It is absurdly long for her, of course, and as she slipped into it she laughed softly at the comical figure she presented.
“It is velly nice, I like it. But it must be cut off. You cannot come near me with all this on the floor.”
She glided once or twice across the room, like a big-winged moth, with the soft sound of silk frou-frou on the matting, and then the gown was laid aside, so that she might more easily find the other presents.
Then the box of fondants was discovered. What rapture! Smiles stole over her face. Her little fingers trembled when she at last made up her mind to undo the satin ribbon, which, crossing from corner to corner, is tied in a great bow in the centre of the lid. There are wonderful sweets of all sorts, things which Mousmé almost fears to taste, and which when once tasted encourage her to further depredations and experiments.