The servant hesitated, "Your Highness, there is with her also an old attendant, a dame called Suzumè, who—talks."
"Shall we bid the chatterer enter, Yuki?"
"If your Highness permit," laughed Yuki.
"Admit both," said Haganè, and returned to his editorials.
Yuki rose to welcome her guests. As the door was flung back Iriya hesitated for a moment on the threshold. Without a glance toward Yuki she hurried to the Prince, and, prostrating herself, bowed again and again, with audible, indrawn breaths. Suzumè, at her heels, followed suit, excelling her mistress in the rapidity of repeated bows, and the power of audible suction.
"Nay, little mother of my Yuki," said Haganè, reaching down a hand, "rise now, I pray. Such extreme of deference is not seemly in the mother of a princess. Kindly be at ease in greeting your daughter, and converse as freely as if I were not present."
Iriya allowed herself to be persuaded to perch on the very rim of a leather chair and sip at a cup of coffee, while she and Yuki exchanged compliments and inquiries as to the health of the members of their respective families. This is always the first social duty in Japan. It takes the place of "weather."
No notice whatever was being taken of old Suzumè, who had continued genuflections and inspiration to the point of vertigo, when Yuki at last came to her assistance. Nothing would induce the old dame to sit on a foreign chair. "She had tried them once," she protested. "They felt like a pile of dead fish on a kitchen bench." Her post, self-assigned, was the extreme corner of the red and green Axminster carpet. While her superiors conversed, she let her keen, sunken eyes dart like dragon-flies from one piece of furniture to the other, from ceiling to floor, from curtain to framed oil-painting, until the very texture of these things must have been photographed on her busy retina.
After a few pleasant if perfunctory questions and replies, Prince Haganè rose, saying that he had work in his private office, and afterward must leave the house. "I hope you will remain with Yuki just as long as your domestic duties permit," he had said last of all. Immediately upon his closing of the door, Iriya began congratulating her daughter upon her splendid fortune, and retailing congratulatory messages from relatives and old friends. The little lady's feet, as she sat on the high dining-room chair, did not quite reach to the floor. The draught on her bare ankles just above the tabi (digitated socks) sawed like ice. With a little gesture of entreaty to Yuki, she hurried over to a comfortable sofa, where she nestled, and drew her feet up under her. Yuki smiled at the naïveté of it. Already she felt years older than her mother. She took her place on a chair, drawing forward a tabouret with smoking outfit, and urged her willing guest to the luxury of a small pipe. A sense of freedom, of delight in this sweet companionship, swept for the moment Yuki's hovering responsibilities.
"Okkasan, dear Okkasan (honorable mother), I am so happy to be with you! But why did you wait so long?" Her voice was rich with tender reproving. "Three long days! Long as the castle moats when the mud is showing. The prince is in this house but seldom. I have been lonely, mother."