Kimono | Page 7

Please be frank, if there is any mystery."
"Oh no, Lady Everington, there is no mystery, I am sure. There is one
family of Fujinami who have many houses and lands in Tokyo and
other towns. I will be quite open with you. They are rather what you in
England call nouveaux riches."
"Really!" Her Ladyship was taken aback for a moment. "But you would
never notice it with Asako, would you? I mean, she does not drop her
Japanese aitches, and that sort of thing, does she?"
"Oh no," Count Saito reassured her, "I do not think Mademoiselle
Asako talks Japanese language, so she cannot drop her aitches."
"I never thought of that," his hostess continued, "I thought that if a
Japanese had money, he must be a daimyo, or something."
The Ambassador smiled.
"English people," he said, "do not know very well the true condition of
Japan. Of course we have our rich new families and our poor old
families just as you have in England. In some aspects our society is just
the same as yours. In others, it is so, different, that you would lose your
way at once in a maze of ideas which would seem to you quite upside
down."
Lady Everington interrupted his reflections in a desperate attempt to get
something out of him by a surprise attack.
"How interesting," she said, "it will be for Geoffrey Harrington and his

wife to visit Japan and find out all about it."
The Ambassador's manner changed.
"No, I do not think," he said, "I do not think that is a good thing at all.
They must not do that. You must not let them."
"But why not?"
"I say to all Japanese men and women who live a long time in foreign
countries or who marry foreign people, 'Do not go back to Japan,' Japan
is like a little pot and the foreign world is like a big garden. If you plant
a tree from the pot into the garden and let it grow, you cannot put it
back into the pot again."
"But, in this case, that is not the only reason," objected Lady
Everington.
"No, there are many other reasons too," the Ambassador admitted; and
he rose from his sofa, indicating that the interview was at an end.
* * * * *
The bridal pair left in a motor-car for Folkestone tinder a hailstorm of
rice, and with the propitious white slipper dangling from the
number-plate behind.
When all her guests were gone, Lady Everington fled to her boudoir
and collapsed in a little heap of sobbing finery on the broad divan. She
was overtired, no doubt; but the sense of her mistake lay heavy upon
her, and the feeling that she had sacrificed to it her best friend, the most
humanly valuable of all the people who resorted to her house. An evil
cloud of mystery hung over the young marriage, one of those sinister
unfamiliar forces which travellers bring home from the East, the curse
of a god or a secret poison or a hideous disease.
It would be so natural for those two to want to visit Japan and to know
their second home. Yet both Sir Ralph Cairns and Count Saito, the only

two men that day who knew anything about the real conditions, had
insisted that such a visit would be fatal. And who were these Fujinamis
whom Count Saito knew, but did not know? Why had she, who was so
socially careful, taken so much for granted just because Asako was a
Japanese?
CHAPTER II
HONEYMOON
_Asa no kami Ware wa kezuraji Utsukushiki Kimi ga ta-makura
Fureteshi mono wo._
(My) morning sleep hair I will not comb; For it has been in contact
with The pillowing hand of My beautiful Lord!
The Barringtons left England for a prolonged honeymoon, for Geoffrey
was now free to realise his favourite project of travelling abroad. So
they became numbered among that shoal of English people out of
England, who move restless leisure between Paris and the Nile.
Geoffrey had resigned his commission in the army. His friends thought
that this was a mistake. For the loss of a man's career, even when it is
uncongenial to him, is a serious amputation, and entails a lesion of
spiritual blood. He had refused his father's suggestion of settling down
in a house on the Brandan estate, for Lord Brandan was an unpleasing
old gentleman, a frequenter of country bars and country barmaids. His
son wished to keep his young bride as far away as possible from a
spectacle of which he was heartily ashamed.
First of all they went to Paris, which Asako adored; for was it not her
home? But this time she made the acquaintance of a Paris unknown to
her,