“Mousmé, you’ll be ill.”
“No, Cy-reel, not nearly so sweet and ill-producing as teriyaki.”
I laughed at the gentle sophistry and suggested that we should go to breakfast.
After the meal a huge bullock-cart came along the road which runs at the foot of our sloping garden. It is laden with New Year’s gifts to tempt those who have put off the inevitable spending of sen and yen till the last possible moment.
Mousmé drew me along the garden path, past the iris pond, in the shade of which gold-fish are keeping New Year’s day on a fly-and-mosquito diet, to the side of the cart. The proprietors in new suits are explaining the merits of their wares, which are cheapened enormously as at Western “sale” times. A light air stirred the paper lanterns with which the cart was decked.
One represented a huge gold-fish with a gold and vermilion body and fins boldly sketched in black. It took Mousmé’s fancy. We purchased it, and earned the absurdly exaggerated thanks of the smiling vendors, knowing the while that we did not require it, and that it would be placed with a score of others, hung on their slight bamboo rods, in the cupboard at the end of the passage.
Some night, perhaps, unless another lantern comes more easily to hand, we might take it out to guide us on our way down to the chaya at which the best geishas dance.
During the whole of the morning we were expectant. Before sunset many of Mousmé’s numerous relations will have called to wish us New Year joys: and my respected, if too effusive, mother-in-law will have once more asked me if I am satisfied with her daughter.
She even yet seems to think that her daughter is on approval, and liable at any time to be returned with liquidated damages in the form of an extra handsome kimono from Nara-Ya’s famous store on the Bund. Everyone calls on everyone, and after mid-day we are not long left without visitors.