“What an odd flat shining thing!” she said, and, taking up the mirror, looked into it.
For a moment she said nothing at all, but the great tears of anger and jealousy stood in her pretty eyes, and her face flushed from forehead to chin.
“A woman!” she cried, “a woman! So that is his secret! He keeps a woman in this cupboard. A woman, very young and very pretty—no, not pretty at all, but she thinks herself so. A dancing-girl from Kioto, I’ll be bound; ill-tempered too—her face is scarlet; and oh, how she frowns, nasty little spitfire. Ah, who could have thought it of him? Ah, it’s a miserable girl I am—and I’ve cooked his daikon and mended his hakama a hundred times. Oh! oh! oh!”
With that, she threw the mirror into its case, and slammed-to the cupboard door upon it. Herself she flung upon the mats, and cried and sobbed as if her heart would break.
In comes her husband.
“I’ve broken the thong of my sandal,” says he, “and I’ve come to—— But what in the world?” and in an instant he was down on his knees beside Mistress Tassel doing what he could to comfort her, and to get her face up from the floor where she kept it.
“Why, what is it, my own darling?” says he.
“Your own darling!” she answers very fierce through her sobs; and “I want to go home,” she cries.
“But, my sweet, you are at home, and with your own husband.”
“Pretty husband!” she says, “and pretty goings-on, with a woman in the cupboard! A hateful, ugly woman that thinks herself beautiful; and she has my green sleeve-linings there with her to boot.”