As for Cherry-blossom, she told her, missionary fashion, that she would certainly go to hell and be burnt like Lotus-bud’s loaves if she did not stop vanishing down town with riksha men; and Cherry-blossom ground her nose on the matting and wept, and promised reformation, and went out two nights afterwards with No. 173 to a grand blaze up at the O Suwa temple, where she devoured candied beans and comfits, and bowed before graven images, and had a general good time with a host of “heathen” people like herself.
Cherry-blossom’s rikshas never cost her anything. Love lent them to her.
Leslie’s socks up to this had always been vanishing, and the ones that remained, were always, or generally, in holes. The Mousmés said it must be the mice. Campanula, however, found Pine-breeze one morning cleaning a kettle with a silk dress-sock. It seemed silk socks at half a guinea a pair gave a polish nothing else would give.
The kettles were duller after that, but the depredations of the mice ceased.
Having looked at the promise of the azaleas, she went in to see how things were getting on.
Presently she and Leslie were seated at breakfast opposite to one another on the floor. Leslie, attired in a suit of faultlessly fitting pale gray tweed, looked much more like an Indian cavalry officer on leave than an umbrella merchant, as he called himself. He had arranged to call for Jane du Telle at ten o’clock to take her out shopping; the gloomy thoughts of the night before, the effect of the opium, and the effect of the dream, had vanished.
He was sipping his tea, and glancing over the Japan Mail, when Campanula interrupted him.
“What iss Dick?” she suddenly asked; she prolonged her s’s in the faintest degree, difficult to reproduce in print, for there is no type capable of representing an s and a quarter.
“What is what?” asked Leslie, lowering the Japan Mail, and staring at his pretty vis-â-vis.