iquid powder. This hideous
embellishment covers not only the Mongolian yellow, which every
Japanese woman seems anxious to hide, but also the natural and
charming nuances of young skin, under a white monotonous surface
like a mask of clay. Painted roses bloomed on the girl's cheeks. The
eyebrows were artificially darkened as well as the lines round the
eyes. The face and its expression, in fact, were quite obscured by
cosmetics; and Miss Fujinami was wrapped in a cloud of cheap scent
like a servant-girl on her evening out.

She spoke English well. In fact, at school she had achieved a really
brilliant career, and she had even attended a University for a time
with the intention of reading for a degree, an attainment rare among
Japanese girls. But overwork brought on its inevitable result. Books
had to be banished, and glasses interposed to save the tired eyes from
the light. It was a bitter disappointment for Sadako, who was a proud
and ambitious girl, and it had not improved her disposition.

After the first formalities Asako was shown round the house. The
sameness of the rooms surprised her. There was nothing to distinguish
them except the different woods used in their ceilings and walls, a
distinction which betrayed its costliness and its taste only to the
practised eye. Each room was spotless and absolutely bare, with golden
_tatami_, rice-straw mats with edgings of black braid, fixed into the
flooring, by whose number the size of a Japanese room is measured.
Asako admired the pale white _shoji_, the sliding windows of opaque
glowing paper along the side of the room open to the outdoor light,
the _fusuma_ or sliding partitions between room and room, set in the
framework of the house, some of them charmingly painted with sketches
of scenery, flowers, or people, some of them plain cream-coloured
boards flecked with tiny specks of gold.

Nothing broke the sameness of these rooms except the double alcove,
or _tokonoma_ with its inevitable hanging picture, its inevitable
ornament, and its spray of blossom. Between the double niche stood
that pillar of wood which Sadako explained as being the soul of the
room, the leading feature from which its character was taken, being
either plain and firm, or twisted and ornate, or else still unshaped,
with the bosses of amputated branches seared and black protesting
against confinement. The _tokonoma_, as the word suggests, must
originally have been the sleeping-place of the owner