She was the dunce, or, rather, had been the dunce at the mission school; this is not saying very much against her, for Japanese girls are amazingly quick in the “uptake,” learning coming to them as easily as ignorance to English girls; all the same she had been the dunce. She had never been able to conquer the letter “l” in English; and would say “raidy” for “lady;” yet she had a memory of sorts, blocks of facts swam in the ocean of her unintelligence like those houses that float about after an inundation of the Mississippi.
But the place left vacant in her skull by want of learning was by no means devoid of a tenant; therein dwelt a colossal impudence, a supreme self-assurance that sheltered and helped to hide the nakedness of her mind, and even obtained for her, amongst her girl friends, a sort of fungoid reputation for cleverness.
For when Kiku San said a thing, she said it with such assurance that it seemed true—the assurance of the absolutely untrustworthy intellect, which of all assurances is the greatest.
She was sitting now on her heels in a bare room on the upper floor, a tobacco-mono at her side, and in her hands a round flat box with a glass lid. She was playing at Pigs-in-Clover.
The two Mousmés bowed to one another with great ceremony, enquiring after each other’s honorific health, and then Campanula came to rest upon the matting opposite to her friend.
They formed a pretty picture in the bare room with its chess-board matting, against the bare walls, whose only ornament was a kakemono representing Fuji San crested with snow.
Kiku was soon to be married—married to a government clerk to whom she had been engaged nearly since birth; and she entertained Campanula with long and uninteresting descriptions of her husband-to-be, his mother, his father, his grandfather, who lived at Nagoya, his brothers and sisters, how old they were and all about them.
Kiku was a bore, a female bore of the first water, and in this respect she could have given any old member of the Rag or Carlton points, and beaten him.
She told all these things looking up from under her thick eyelids, and with a half-smile, and Campanula listened, half mesmerized, wholly weary, but with all her courteous soul awake to do honor to the tale.
At last an hiatus occurred of which Campanula took advantage to ask the question in her mind.