This morning she was lamenting her want of geography, and casting about for some friend learned in the art. Of course she might have gone to Howard San, but she would have to wait till school was over, and, besides she felt a certain diffidence in approaching him on the subject, so she turned to the shop of Mr. Initogo.
Mr. Initogo was sitting on his heels on the floor of his shop, engaged in the gentle art of making tea; it was one of his fads that he always made his own tea with his own hands. Beside him stood an hibachi, on which a kettle was coming to the boil; before him, a tea-cup without a handle on a tray, and a microscopic tea-pot.
He warmed the tea-cup with a few drops of hot water; then, from a cylindrical tea-canister, with a thing like a snuff-scoop, he took a small quantity of green tea—tea of the color that an old black coat turns after years of sun and rain—this he popped into the tea-pot.
Then the honorable hot water being ready, he poured it into a porcelain dish to let it cool slightly, which it did, becoming converted during the act into the honorable old hot water.
The honorable old hot water being now ready, he poured it into the tea-pot, popped on the lid, looked up, and saw Campanula.
So immersed in his darling employment had he been, that he had not observed her entrance.
She wished to see Kiku? She was upstairs; this with a thousand apologies for his own blindness, and comparisons of himself with worms and other sightless things.
Campanula knew the way up; she had been up often enough before, and up she went.
Kiku San, since we hinted at her as a playmate of Campanula, had grown. The tumbling tot that Leslie had once caught by the “scruff” of her obi and held out at arm’s length wriggling, for the amusement of M’Gourley, had become a Mousmé with a face at once heavy and flighty-looking; a broad face, pretty enough, but with a maddeningly irresponsible expression.
Pine-breeze was bad enough in the irresponsible line, but she could have learnt much from Kiku.