"Certainly!"
"Not mine!"
"No!"
"He shall be told that he loves me!"
She shook her fist at her favorite deity, sitting unruffled in her shrine.
"Benten! You shall let him know!"
"The goddess is too decorous for that," chided the maid. "The only woman who tells a man that she loves him—"
"Is me!" cried her mistress to the shocked maid.
"Aie!" wailed the maid. "There is a kind of woman who does that, but she is not the lady Hoshi—"
"Oh, silence!" laughed the girl. "It would not take me a moment to tell him, if it were not for what he might think! And, perhaps, he is not wise and will not know enough wisdom to think that!"