Geoffrey's conventionality was a little bit shocked at this lack of affection; he was also disappointed at not getting exactly the expected answer.
"Why, what was wrong with it?" he asked.
"Oh, it was not pretty or comfortable," she said, "they were so afraid to spend money. When I wash my hands, they say, 'Do not use too much soap; it is waste.'"
* * * * *
Asako was like a little prisoner released into the sunlight. She dreaded the idea of being thrust back into darkness again.
In this new life of hers anything would have made her happy, that is to say, anything new, anything given to her, anything good to eat or drink, anything soft and shimmery to wear, anything—so long as her big husband was with her. He was the most fascinating of all her novelties. He was much nicer than Lady Everington; for he was not always saying, "Don't," or making clever remarks, which she could not understand. He gave her absolutely her own way, and everything that she admired. He reminded her of an old Newfoundland dog who had been her slave when she was a little girl.
He used to play with her as he would have played with a child, watching her as she tried on her finery, hiding things for her to find, holding them over her head and making her jump for them like a puppy, arranging her ornaments for her in those continual private exhibitions which took up so much of her time. Then she would ring the bell and summon all the chambermaids within call to come and admire; and Geoffrey would stand among all these womenfolk, listening to the chorus of "Mon Dieu!" and "Ah, que c'est beau!" and "Ah, qu'elle est gentille!" like some Hector who had strayed into the gynaeceum of Priam's palace. He felt a little foolish, perhaps, but very happy, happy in his wife's naive happiness and affection, which did not require any mental effort to understand, nor that panting pursuit on which he had embarked more than once in order to keep up with the witty flirtatiousness of some of the beauties of Lady Everington's salon.
Happiness shone out of Asako like light. But would she always be happy? There were the possibilities of the future to be reckoned with, sickness, childbirth, and the rearing of children, the hidden development of the character which so often grows away from what it once cherished, the baleful currents of outside influences, the attraction and repulsion of so-called friends and enemies all of which complicate the primitive simplicity of married life and forfeit the honeymoon Eden. Adam and Eve in the garden of the Creation can hear the voice of God whispering in the evening breeze; they can live without jars and ambitions, without suspicion and without reproaches. They have no parents, no parents-in-law, no brothers, sisters, aunts, or guardians, no friends to lay the train of scandal or to be continually pulling them from each other's arms. But the first influence which crosses the walls of their paradise, the first being to whom they speak, which possesses the semblance of a human voice, is most certainly Satan and that Old Serpent, who was a liar and a slanderer from the beginning, and whose counsels will lead inevitably to the withdrawal of God's presence and to the doom of a life of pain and labor.
There was one cloud in the heaven of their happiness. Geoffrey was inclined to tease Asako about her native country. His ideas about Japan were gleaned chiefly from musical comedies. He would call his wife Yum Yum and Pitti Sing. He would fix the end of one of her black veils under his hat, and would ask her whether she liked him better with a pigtail.
"Captain Geoffrey," she would complain, "it is the Chinese who wear the pigtail; they are a very savage people."