When we were breathless we hauled in our old friend the big hibachi, with a peck of glowing charcoal right in the middle.  We sat on our folded feet and made a big circle all around, with only the glimmer of the coals for a light.  Then we talked.

Each girl had a story to tell, either of herself or some one we had known together.  Over many we laughed.  For others the tears started.

Warmed by companionship and moved by unwonted freedom, how much the usually reserved women revealed of themselves, their lives, their trials and desires!  But whatever the story, the dominant note was acceptance of what was, without protest.  It may be fatalism, Mate, but it is indisputable that looking finality in the face had brought to all of them a quietness of spirit that no longing for wider fields or personal ambition can disturb.

None of them had known their husbands before marriage.  Few had ever seen them.  Many were compelled to live with the difficulties of an exacting mother-in-law, who had forgotten that she was ever a young wife.

But above it all there was a cheerful peacefulness; a willingness of service to the husband and all his demands, a joy in children and home, that was convincing as to the depth and dignity of character which can so efface itself for the happiness of others.

One girl, Miss Deserted Lobster Field, was missing.  I asked about her and this is her story.  She was quite pretty; when she left school there was no difficulty in marrying her off.  Two months afterward the young husband left to serve his time in the army.  For some reason the mother-in-law did not “enter into the spirit of the girl,” and without consulting those most concerned, she divorced her son and sent the girl home.  When the soldier-husband returned, a new wife, whom he had never seen, was waiting for him at the cottage door.

The sent-home wife was terribly in the way in her father’s house, for by law she belonged neither there nor in any other place.  It is difficult to re-marry these offcasts.  Something, however, had to be done.  So dear father took a stroll out into the village, and being sonless adopted a young boy as the head of his house.  A yoshi this boy is called.  Father married the adopted son to the soldier’s wife that was, securely and permanently.  A yoshi has no voice in any family matter and is powerless to get a divorce.

Moral:  If in Japan you want to make sure of keeping a husband when you get him, take a boy to raise, then marry him.

But the wedding of weddings is the one which took place last summer, by suggestion.  The great unseen has lived in America for two years.  The maid makes her home in the school.  The groom-to-be wrote to a friend in Hiroshima:  “Find me a wife.”  The friend wrote back:  “Here she is.”  Miss Chestnut Tree, the maid, fluttered down to the court-house, had her name put on the house register of the far-away groom, did up her hair as a married woman should and went back to work.