Perhaps old Mr. Fujinami San's daughter also, I think: very
bastard: I don't know!"

So he rambled on in the fashion of servants all the world over, until
Asako knew all the ramifications of her relatives, legitimate and
illegitimate.

She gathered that the men had all left Tokyo during the hot season,
and that only the women were left in the house. This encouraged her
to descend from her eyrie, and to endeavour to take up her position in
her family, which was beginning to appear the less reassuring the more
she learned about its history.

The life of a Japanese lady of quality is peculiarly tedious. She is
relieved from the domestic cares which give occupation to her humbler
sisters. But she is not treated as an equal or as a companion by her
menfolk, who are taught that marriage is for business and not for
pleasure, and consequently that home-life is a bore. She is supposed
to find her own amusements, such as flower-arrangement, tea-ceremony,
music, kimono-making and the composition of poetry. More often, this
refined and innocent ideal degenerates into a poor trickle of an
existence, enlivened only by scrappy magazine reading, servants'
gossip, empty chatter about clothes, neighbours and children,
backbiting, envying and malice.

Once Sadako took her cousin to a charity entertainment given for the
Red Cross at the house of a rich nobleman. A hundred or more ladies
were present; but stiff civility prevailed. None of the guests seemed
to know each other. There was no friendly talking. There were no
men guests. There was three hours' agony of squatting, a careful
adjustment of expensive kimonos, weak tea and tasteless cakes, a blank
staring at a dull conjuring performance, and deadly silence.

"Do you ever have dances?" Asako asked her cousin.

"The _geisha_ dance, because they are paid," said Sadako primly. Her
pose was no longer cordial and sympathetic. She set herself up as
mentor to this young savage, who did not know the usages of civilized
society.

"No, not like that," said the girl from England; "but dancing among
yourselves with your men friends."

"Oh, no, that would not be nice at all. Only tipsy persons would dance
like that."

Asako tried, not very successfully, to chat in easy Japanese with
her cousin; but she fled from the interminable talking parties of
her relatives, where she could not understand one word, except the
innumerable parentheses--_naruhodo_ (indeed!) and _so des'ka_ (is it
so?