So I drifted on from week to week, occasionally having to remind myself that, even in America, the "eyelids of a samurai know not moisture," but, on the whole, finding the days full of new and pleasing experiences. I soon learned to like everything about my home, although, at first, the curtained windows, the heavy, dark furniture, the large pictures and the carpeted floors seemed to hem me in.
But I revelled in our wide porches and the broad lawn which swept in a graceful slope, between curving paths, down to the low stone wall. The battlemented top was like an elongated castle turret, and the big stone posts of the iron gates, half hidden from the porch by tall evergreens, seemed to me to have a protecting air. Then there was one big, crooked pine and an icho tree, standing side by side, which when the moon was just right, made a perfect picture of an old Japanese poem:
"Between bent branches, a silver sickle swings aloft in youthful incompleteness, unknowing of its coming day of glory."
Oh, I did love all the outdoors of that home, from the very first moment that I saw it!
Much of my time was spent on one or the other of our three big porches, for Mother loved them almost as much as I did, and we used to go out the first thing after breakfast, she with her sewing and I with the newspaper. In order to improve my English I read the paper every day, and I found it very interesting. I always turned first to the list of divorces in the court news. It was such a surprising thing to me that more women than men should be seeking for freedom. One day I told Mother that I felt sorry for the husbands.
"Why?" she asked. "It is as often the fault of the husband as the wife, I think. Isn't it so in Japan?"
"But after choosing for herself it must be hard for her wifely pride to acknowledge failure," I replied.
"How about the man?" said Mother.
"He sees, and wants, and beckons;
She blushes, and smiles, and comes—
or not, as she pleases. That is her part: to come or not to come."