"The o jo san will tell us something of foreign habits as we sew," suggested Iriya, the peacemaker.
"Yes—yes—I will be what is called over there the bureau of information," laughed wilful Yuki. "Any questions from you, Mr. Cat?" she cried, holding the drowsy animal high above her and smiling into its blinking eyes.—"Do American cats like rice?" "No." "Queer cats, you say,—and so they think of you." "Do they wear tails?" "Yes, long ones." "What do they use them for?" "For getting pinched in doors." "No more questions, Pussy San? Ah, you will never learn. Ruskin says that curiosity forms tendrils of the mind."
"What I would like to feel sure of, honorable young lady, is this," began Suzumè, primly, with a disapproving glance toward the cat.
"We are ready, Madame Suzumè, speak on," said Yuki, cuddling pussy back into her sleeve.
"Is it really true, as newspapers and pictures say, that women over there, even women of decent character, go to evening entertainments with no clothes above the waist, dance with red-faced men until they are on the verge of apoplexy, and then have to be restored by much fanning and a cold medicine called 'punch'?"
"Not altogether, good nurse," said Yuki, fighting hard to retain a semblance of gravity. "They wear cloth and flowers, feathers and jewelry above the waist, and arrange them with great beauty; but it is true that they dance with men, and that their shoulders and arms are bare."
"That is a strange custom," mused Suzumè. "Even our Sacred Empress condescends to go with bare arms. Why, I wonder, do they wish to expose arms more than legs? There is more leg, and in a supple young girl it is more shapely."
"That is too hard a thing for me," laughed Yuki. "Well, Maru, your eyes are big and solemn like the Owl San in our pine. What is your question?"
Maru, after much giggling and blushing, confessed to a desire to know, once for all, whether foreigners had toes like real people, or whether, as she had been assured from childhood, they possessed but a single horny hoof, which, from desire to hide the ugliness, they kept in pointed leather cases known as shoes.
"That is false entirely. I have seen hundreds of barefoot children in America, and they all had ten toes, even as we."