"Oh, Hiko! Would you help me?"
"I should consider it an honor to help you," he said.
It was quiet in the semi-darkness of the projection room. Francine leaned her head against the back rest of her chair, looked across at the stand light where Ohashi had been working. He had gone for the films on Oriental ritual dances that had just arrived from Los Angeles by plane. His coat was still draped across the back of his chair, his pipe still smouldered in the ashtray on the work-table. All around their two chairs were stacked the residue of four days' almost continuous research: notebooks, film cans, boxes of photographs, reference books.
She thought about Hiko Ohashi: a strange man. He was fifty and didn't look a day over thirty. He had grown children. His wife had died of cholera eight years ago. Francine wondered what it would be like married to an Oriental, and she found herself thinking that he wasn't really Oriental with his Princeton education and Occidental ways. Then she realized that this attitude was a kind of white snobbery.
The door in the corner of the room opened softly. Ohashi came in, closed the door. "You awake?" he whispered.
She turned her head without lifting it from the chairback. "Yes."
"I'd hoped you might fall asleep for a bit," he said. "You looked so tired when I left."
Francine glanced at her wristwatch. "It's only three-thirty. What's the day like?"
"Hot and windy."