mit was also Mademoiselle Jasmin's) is rare, particularly at Nagasaki.

Among the middle classes and the common people, the ugliness is more
pleasant and sometimes becomes a kind of prettiness. The eyes are still
too small and hardly able to open, but the faces are rounder, browner,
more vivacious; and in the women remains a certain vagueness of feature,
something childlike which prevails to the very end of their lives.

They are so laughing, and so merry, all these little Nipponese dolls!
Rather a forced mirth, it is true, studied, and at times with a false
ring; nevertheless one is attracted by it.

Chrysantheme is an exception, for she is melancholy. What thoughts are
running through that little brain? My knowledge of her language is still
too limited to enable me to find out. Moreover, it is a hundred to one
that she has no thoughts whatever. And even if she had, what do I care?

I have chosen her to amuse me, and I should really prefer that she should
have one of those insignificant little thoughtless faces like all the
others.

CHAPTER VIII

THE NECESSARY VEIL

When night comes on, we light two hanging lamps of religious symbolism,
which burn till daylight, before our gilded idol.

We sleep on the floor, on a thin cotton mattress, which is unfolded and
laid out over our white matting. Chrysantheme's pillow is a little wooden
block, cut so as to fit exactly the nape of her neck, without disturbing
the elaborate head-dress, which must never be taken down; the pretty
black hair I shall probably never see undone. My pillow, a Chinese model,
is a kind of little square drum covered over with serpent-skin.

We sleep under a gauze mosquito-net of sombre greenish-blue, dark as the
shades of night, stretched out on an orange-colored ribbon. (These are
the traditional colors, and all respectable families of Nagasaki possess
a similar net.) It envelops us like a tent; the mosquitoes and the
night-moths whirl around it.

This sounds very pretty, and written down looks very well. In reality,
however, it is not so; something, I know not what, is lacking, and
everything is very paltry. In other lands, in the delightful isles of
Oceania, in the old, lifeless quarters of Stamboul, it seemed as if mere
words could never express all I felt, and I struggled vainly against my
own inability to render, in human language, the penetrating charm
surrounding me.

Here, on the contrary, words exact and truthful in themselves