O'Kami San explained that it was to avoid the inconveniences of luggage. They were going to a little town in the hills and it would be difficult to carry trunks.
Around her head the bride wore a broad band of pink silk, almost covering her hair, to keep the horns of jealousy from growing.
Billie looked at her pityingly.
"Poor little thing," she thought. "Why doesn't that good-for-nothing brother teach her something? It doesn't seem to me that his schooling did him any good. He's so fanatical and bigoted."
"I hope you will be very happy, O'Kami San," said Mary. "I believe you said there was no mother-in-law."
"Not no mother-in-law," answered the bride, in the tone of one describing a great blessing. "Honorable husband of age like mother-in-law."
"You mean your husband is not young?"
O'Kami San nodded.
"Verily old," she said, with just the faintest quiver at the corners of her mouth.
Mary and Billie regarded her with compassion. How little romance there was in a Japanese girl's life! O'Kami San, so young and pretty and charming, too, was about to enter into years of drudgery perhaps; the wife of a cranky old man, and here she was accepting her fate as calmly as a novitiate about to take the vows for life and enter a convent.