“No, abominably ugly,” he returned, frowning contemptuously.
A small, roguish smile dimpled the girl’s lips.
“Perhaps,” said she, “I am also like unto them.”
“Never!” said Yoshida, angrily.
“If you were,” said his father, “you would never be wife to a Yamashiro. No Yamashiro would marry a white barbarian.”
The Yamashiro family believed Hyacinth half English. This fact galled them, but they ignored it.
Hastily, nervously, Aoi moved closer to her daughter, laying her hand upon the little ones in the girl’s lap.
“Please, little one,” she said, “bring for the august ones the pipes and the tobacco-bon.”
Outside the closed shoji the girl paused and drew from her sleeve the little hand mirror. She looked deeply into it, her eyes wide open now.
“Perhaps,” she said, “I am like unto them. They are not abominably ugly, if they look like me. No, for Komazawa is also of their blood, and I—and those clothes were Engleesh.”