"But why, dear girl, why?" He gathered her into his arms. She did not resist, yet he sensed in her body a sort of stiffness, coldness; the flood tide of ecstatic emotion had passed. "But, Sadako-san, why should you waste your future, why place your back on happiness because your past has been wretched? Don't you care for me at all? Couldn't you love me just a little if you tried?"
She raised her head, smiled up to him wistfully. "Yes, I think I could love you, Hugh-san. But I'm not going to. I won't try. Can't you see how impossible it is. I'm unclean. I'm soiled. Do you think that I should want to come to you like that?"
He started to answer, but she placed a hand over his mouth. "Please, Hugh-san, don't talk. Just let us sit like this; yes, hold me, just a little while." She nestled close up to him, like a tired child, and he held her, wondering at the unexpected and strange perversities of women in matters of love, the impossibility of foreseeing or refuting the baffling obliquities of their reasoning. In old Japan such a mishap might have been looked upon with the merciful eye of tolerance; and in new Japan, the complaint of teachers in even the highest girl schools was that the maidens were babbling sophisticatedly of free love and the like. These young Japanese obtained their ideas from the oddest corners of Western modes of thought, from chance-bought or borrowed books, taking for gospel whatever they happened to absorb, be it from long antiquated volumes picked up in a Kanda second-hand bookshop or from the misconstrued conceptions of Western philosophy casually heard from these fanatic professors and students. But where could she have gotten this absurd idea that she was soiled, that her value, that wondrous gift of beauty and charm, had been vitiated, rendered utterly worthless, like that? At last he asked her, "Sadako-san, how did you get such a foolish idea like that? Of course, you're good, and sweet, and pure, and beautiful. You must never think of yourself as soiled, unclean; it's unhealthy, absurd. Of course, you don't believe such nonsense."
She answered, a little wearily. "But, of course, I do know, and you know. I am a Christian."
He almost shook her. "Of all the foolish things! Who ever taught you Christianity like that?" He tried to argue with her, became voluble. He was not familiar with intricacies of doctrine, but surely this was a ridiculously antiquated interpretation of the spirit of Christianity of to-day, absurd, monstrous. He became voluble, tried to break down or persuade. And, anyway, what was really Christianity to her? He knew very well that many of the Japanese Christians were so merely because it was haikara, modern, placed them a little aside from the mob in the rôle of independent, advanced thinkers. But why should she be like the rest of the shallow fools?
"Yes, I know what you say is true. There are many Christians like that. Even my father, who first taught me Christianity, was like that. I know he really had more confidence in Nichiren. But, Hugh-san, I am so tired. I want to rest. Go in and sleep. I shall sleep here."
The recollection of the two beds in there, side by side, suggestively, brought his mind to the problem of the moment. "Of course not, dearest. Go in and rest. I can sleep out here." But she would not have that. Both grew insistent. It seemed an impasse. Finally he went in and dragged the two beds apart, one to each end of the long room. Around hers, designated by the curved wooden headrest designed to support woman's elaborate coiffure, he built a rampart with the screens.
"And now, Sadako-san, here is a place for you. Can't you trust me?"
She came up to him. "Of course, I trust you." She raised herself on her toes, placed her hands to his head, pressed her cheek against his, warm, soft. He moved his arms to clasp her, but she slipped away, disappeared. He could hear the dropping of her garments to the tatami beyond the barrier of screens.
When he awoke sunlight was filtering in through the paper shoji. He called, "Sadako-san," but there was no answer. He went over to the screens which guarded her, knocked, called again, but she had gone. Evidently she had taken the opportunity to go to the bath.