Broken Butterflies

by Henry W. Kinney

She brought both hands up to her hair, smoothed it back slowly. "I ran away," she spoke evenly, measuredly—evidently she had rehearsed carefully what she intended to say—"I ran away because I heard that they wanted me to marry Kikuchi-san."

During the night he had puzzled the matter over and had come to the conclusion that it must be something like that, that the family, after the old Japanese fashion, must have decided that now that she had reached the age when girls must marry, arrangements must be made for contracting a suitable alliance. He had even thought that young Kikuchi might be the one; the families were close, and the Suzuki money might fit in well with the noble but not over-wealthy Kikuchi house. It seemed natural enough; Kikuchi had shown that he liked the girl. He had wondered whether this young Japanese might not resent the evident intimacy of a foreigner with this bright, young beauty, though he had never given sign thereof. And now, why the deuce had she come to him? That, too, had puzzled him. Could it be that——? No, of course, not. Still, the thought had insisted. What if she wanted him to marry her? The idea had had allurement. He liked her very much, could almost contrive to believe that he might love her. But he held out against the thought; the family would be sure to set itself against it; and even if they should marry first and confront it with the accomplished fact, the papers would be sure to revel in the incident, as they always did where daughters of the aristocracy followed the unconventional. They would make her out a decadent, wantonly abandoning the decent traditions, would harry her into unhappiness with their hue and cry. And then he himself; he had made up his mind that Karsten had been right, that in spite of its allurement, marriage with a Japanese girl would not work out in his case. He had reasoned it all out that time at Hakone. But was that why she had come to him?

She seemed to read his thought. "I came to you, Kent-san, because I could go to no Japanese. They would have been shocked, would have sent me home. And I wanted to talk to some one, to get away from the family where I was. I knew that the go-between would be coming in a few days, and I wanted to get advice first. I didn't know what to do.

"But why don't you want to marry Kikuchi-san? Don't you like him?" he was sparring, trying to elicit from her something that might give a clew.

"Yes, I like him, but I would never marry a Japanese like him, to be just like these other old-fashioned Japanese married women, always obedient, always compelled to serve him, to have to regard whatever he might do as right, even if he had geisha sweethearts; never to have a right to have a personality of my own."

"But surely Kikuchi-san is modern. I know him. Sometimes I think he's almost radical. He takes after foreign ideas in everything. It seems to me——"

"Oh, yes, of course, he's modern. He goes to the dances, and dresses after the haikara fashions, and plays golf, and talks very advanced politics, and all that. And in all that he is really modern, advanced, like so many of our young men; but when it comes to marriage, to the matter of the standing of women, he's like the rest of them, too. They want modernism and liberalism, but only for the men. In regard to us women their view is different; there they want to stick entirely to the old, hidebound rules. They want the modern freedom of thought and of action—but only for the men.

"But we women, we want the right to think too, to live our own lives just as your women do. We are no more stupid, no more old-fashioned than the men. But they are all against us, all the men. See how often the Fujin Koraon, the Public Opinion of Women paper, is suppressed by the police. But still we learn and we know. Women are going into business and into politics; there are even many women Socialists, and the police are afraid of them. And in the matter of marriage; we want now to have a right to say whom we want to marry, to have a right to marry—for love." She looked him straight in the eye, compelling her glance to meet his, blushing a little, but only finger tips rubbing restlessly against one another betraying her nervousness. "Even in school we talked about love, yes, even free love. It is right if people love each other, if there's no other way. Shikataganai. It can't be helped then. And the principal called in Shinto priests, and had them perform, right in the school, the 'soul-quieting ceremony,' and eighteen of us had to assist them, all dressed in white. And we laughed at it all. It was so silly.

"That is the reason why you hear about the Clover Leaf Club, which receives letters from men and women who want to marry, and the officers sort them out and bring together the couples which they think are well matched. That's why you see sometimes in the newspapers advertisements for husbands, occasionally even for foreign husbands," she laughed demurely. "Oh, that's silly, I know, but still it all shows how we feel. And that's how I feel. I don't want to marry, at least, not now; but if I ever do, I shall want to make my own choice, and I shall surely choose a man who believes as I do.