"I hope so, but—" she paused; "if I wore these clothes the people would follow me about the streets. If I wore European clothes, I would look like—what you say—a fright."
"Never!" Again she shook her head.
"Yess, yess I would." And the pity of it is I am afraid she was right.
The Little Maid did not walk the hills much.
"Japanese men do not like for women to go about much," she said. "My uncle does not like that I go about alone, but my father he does not care. He has been in America."
"It is perfectly safe?"
"Yes, perrfectly safe. Is it not so in America?"
"Well, no, not always; at least not in the South, where I come from."
She did not ask why, though I should not have been surprised to learn that she knew, and I did not explain.
She was very fond of Schiller, she said, and she had read many American and English novels. She liked "The Crisis" very much—she did not mention others—though she liked better the novels that were written by women.