“Many men are like that.  Because of their sickness their wives cannot have babies.”

Asako shivered.  This beautiful country of hers seemed to be full of bogeys like a child’s dream.

Another time Sadako asked her with much diffidence and slanting of the eyes,—­

“I wish to learn about—­kissing.”

“What is the Japanese for ’kiss’?” laughed Asako.

“Oh!  There is no such word,” expostulated Sadako, shocked at her cousin’s levity, “we Japanese do not speak of such things.”

“Then Japanese people don’t kiss?”

“Oh, no,” said the girl.

“Not ever?” asked Asako, incredulous.

“Only when they are—­quite alone.”

“Then when you see foreign people kissing in public, you think it is very funny?”

“We think it is disgusting,” answered her cousin.

It is quite true.  Foreigners kiss so recklessly.  They kiss on meeting:  they kiss on parting.  They kiss in London:  they kiss in Tokyo.  They kiss indiscriminately their fathers, mothers, wives, mistresses, cousins and aunts.  Every kiss sends a shiver down the spine of a Japanese observer of either sex, as we should be shocked by the crude exhibition of an obscene gesture.  For this blossoming of our buds of affection suggests to him, with immediate and detailed clearness, that other embrace of which in his mind it is the inseparable concomitant.

The Japanese find the excuse that foreigners know no better, just as we excuse the dirty habits of natives.  But they quote the kiss as an indisputable proof of the lowness of our moral standard, and as a sign of the guilt, not of individuals so much as of our whole civilisation.

“Foreign people kiss too much,” said cousin Sadako, “it is a bad thing.  If I had a husband, I would always fear he kiss somebody else.”

“That is why I am so happy with Geoffrey,” said Asako, “I know he would never love any one but me.”

“It is not safe to be so sure,” said her cousin darkly, “a woman is made for one man, but a man is made for many women.”

Asako, arrayed in a Japanese kimono, and to all appearance as Japanese as her cousin, was sitting in the Fujinami tea-parlour.  She had not understood much of the lesson in tea-ceremony at which she had just assisted.  But the exceeding propriety and dignity of the teacher, the daughter of great people fallen upon evil days, had impressed her.  She longed to acquire that tranquillity of deportment, that slow graceful poise of hand and arm, that low measured speech.  When the teacher had gone, she began to mimic her gestures with all the seriousness of appreciative imitation.

Sadako laughed.  She supposed that her cousin was fooling.  Asako thought that she was amused by her clumsiness.

“I shall never be able to do it,” she sighed.

“But of course you will.  I laugh because you are so like Kikuye San.”

Kikuye San was their teacher.