Dick appeared. Kent told him. He laughed. "By Jove, but that's funny. You do need a guardian. The moment I leave you, you start adventuring on your own. That's a very respectable girl, a stenographer in Tokyo, nice parents, you know. She's no motion-picture lady. You can't do like that. If you are so anxious to meet the motion-picture folk, why didn't you tell me. The fact is that there are a couple right here. I had sort of a halfway date with them. Come on. We'll take them to dinner down in one of the tea houses below in the park. You eat Japanese chow, don't you?"
The two girls were at a table at the farther end of the hall. He had noticed them often. One of them, the elder, he had guessed to be professional of some sort, theatrical, because of her kimono, a bit too bright, and especially her unusual coiffure, after some eccentric foreign fashion, in a mode which he had never seen, a sort of high, long cone, reminiscent of an Assyrian helmet, which showed to advantage her luxuriant hair, black with a faint tinge of chestnut, effective, but odd. The other was one of the girls who had eluded classification. She had puzzled him, with her large, voluptuous mouth, slow smile showing teeth which might really be described as pearly, but with her quiet manner, almost diffident, giving the lie to those sensuous lips.
"O-Tsuru-san. Kin-chan." There was no trouble over these introductions. The girls laughed, made room at the table. "No," said Dick. "It's time to eat. Let us go below."
The tea house was typically Japanese. They slipped off their shoes and squatted down at a low table, on zabuton. The girls were at ease, friendly. He felt as if he had known them for years. Kin-Chan, the elder, evidently lived for excitement. She drank continuously. "Dick-san," she complained, "we should have had a koku-tail before we came down here, but, never mind, we'll have some by-and-by."
She chattered incessantly, flitting from subject to subject, light gossip of Tokyo, dancing, acting, kimono styles, fashions in rings—she let it be known that she was fond of rubies set in platinum—places to go to, hot spring resorts, how she liked foreigners, the wiles of geisha. It amused him to listen to her. As they went back to the dance hall, up the hill, she leaned on his arm confidentially. The perfume from her hair came to him pleasantly. He inhaled it, enjoying it, and her warm, close presence, the bewildering chatter affording flash-like glimpses of the mind of an engaging phase of modern feminine japan.
As they danced, she chattered on, touched on this subject and that, one thought crowding away the other before it had been more than half expressed, giving him a sense as were he surrounded, enveloped, in an aura of bright, strange, girlish musings, a glimmering of myriad fragmentary ideas, oddly, entrancingly interesting. He was beginning to learn what lay inside these budding breasts under the tensely tightened kimono silks—at last.
The other girl said little, smiled, with glimmer of white teeth behind her full, soft lips, but she seemed to absorb her pleasure by feeling it, through the senses, silently. Little by little he tried to induce her to tell about herself. Was she, too, a motion-picture actress? Oh, no! She went to higher school. She lived with her parents.
He mentioned it to Dick, in English. It was delightfully safe, even right in front of the girls.
"She's a liar," said Dick bluntly. "She's an actorine of some sort at the Imperial. Probably a minor one. I don't know. But in a way she's my girl, for the present. She probably wants to throw you off, to hold you off. They have more guile than you think, these girls, behind all their childishness."
So Kin-chan, Little-Gold, fell to Kent, and he saw the girls home, to Tokyo, as Dick lived in Yokohama. He enjoyed Kin-chan, arranged with her to come to Tsurumi again. After that, when the Suzukis could not come, she was often his companion.