You cannot possibly live in Japan without loving your maid-servants. I mean by love that sort of passion which was inspired in Matthew Prior by the lady of fashion aged five.
It was a feature of the House of the Clouds that sometimes on the lower floor you would find a hall with two rooms on either side of it, and sometimes two rooms and no hall, and sometimes, in very hot weather, one huge room. The sliding paper partitions made this possible; nay, very easy, for Mr. Initogo had improved upon the ordinary Japanese method, being of an inventive turn of mind.
He looked into the room on the right of the hall. A chamécen lay on the floor, an hibachi showed a crimson spark, and a dwarf maple in a pot of Arita ware displayed its pretty form vaguely in the twilight.
He looked into the room on the left: no one.
Where was Campanula? She must have returned by this, surely. Perhaps she was upstairs.
He went up, making little noise in his stocking-feet. At the door of his room he peeped in.
There was Campanula. Oh, desolate sight! She was sitting on his big portmanteau all alone in the dusk. Her head was bent.
She looked so forlorn and so small, and the sash of her obi so huge in comparison with the wearer, that he could not but recall how she sat that morning in the Tea House of the Tortoise. That morning, when she had likened herself to a lump of mud; the morning he had proposed to adopt her, and care for her, and make her a chattel of his own.
A moment later, he had caught her up in his arms. She did not resist, but he seemed to have taken up a lifeless thing.
As he carried her downstairs, had he known, it might have seemed strange to him that so great a grief should be so light a burden.