“Red Shirt always speaks of refinement of character or of mental consolation, but he is making a fool of himself by chasing round a geisha. What a dandy rogue. We might let that go if he wouldn’t make fuss about others making fools of themselves. I understand through the principal he stopped your going even to noodle houses or dango shops as unbecoming to the dignity of the school, didn’t he?”
“According to his idea, running after a geisha is a mental consolation but tempura or dango is a material pleasure, I guess. If that’s mental consolation, why doesn’t the fool do it above board? You ought to see the jacknape skipping out of the room when the geisha came into it the other night,—I don’t like his trying to deceive us, but if one were to point it out for him, he would deny it or say it was the Russian literature or that the haiku is a half-brother of the new poetry, and expect to hush it up by twaddling soft nonsense. A weak-knee like him is not a man. I believe he lived the life of a court-maid in former life. Perhaps his daddy might have been a kagema at Yushima in old days.”
“What is a kagema?”
“I suppose something very unmanly,—sort of emasculated chaps. Say, that part isn’t cooked enough. It might give you tape worm.”
“So? I think it’s all right. And, say, Red Shirt is said to frequent Kadoya at the springs town and meet his geisha there, but he keeps it in dark.”
“Kadoya? That hotel?”
“Also a restaurant. So we’ve got to catch him there with his geisha and make it hot for him right to his face.”
“Catch him there? Suppose we begin a kind of night watch?”
“Yes, you know there is a rooming house called Masuya in front of Kadoya. We’ll rent one room upstairs of the house, and keep peeping through a loophole we could make in the shoji.”
“Will he come when we keep peeping at him?”