Nevertheless, my discomfited air does not escape my visitors. M. Kangourou anxiously inquires:
"How do I like her?" And I reply in a low voice, but with great resolution:
"Not at all! I won't have that one. Never!"
I believe that this remark was almost understood in the circle around me. Consternation was depicted on every face, the jaws dropped,
the pipes went out. And now I address my reproaches to Kangourou: "Why had he brought her to me in such pomp, before friends and neighbors of both sexes, instead of showing her to me discreetly as if by chance, as I had wished? What an affront he will compel me now to put upon all these polite persons!"
The old ladies (the mamma no doubt and aunts), prick up their ears, and M. Kangourou translates to them, softening as much as possible, my heartrending decision. I feel really almost sorry for them; the fact is, that for women who, not to put too fine a point upon it, have come to sell a child, they have an air I was not prepared for: I can hardly say an air of respectability (a word in use with us, which is absolutely without meaning in Japan), but an air of unconscious and good-natured simplicity; they are only accomplishing an act perfectly admissible in their world, and really it all resembles, more than I could have thought possible, a bonâ fide marriage.
"But what fault do I find with the little girl?" asks M. Kangourou, in consternation.
I endeavor to present the matter in the most flattering light:
"She is very young," I say; "and then she is too white, too much like our own women. I wished for a yellow one just as a change."
"