Happiness shone out of Asako like light.  But would she always be happy?  There were the possibilities of the future to be reckoned with, sickness, childbirth, and the rearing of children, the hidden development of the character which so often grows away from what it once cherished, the baleful currents of outside influences, the attraction and repulsion of so-called friends and enemies all of which complicate the primitive simplicity of married life and forfeit the honeymoon Eden.  Adam and Eve in the garden of the Creation can hear the voice of God whispering in the evening breeze; they can live without jars and ambitions, without suspicion and without reproaches.  They have no parents, no parents-in-law, no brothers, sisters, aunts, or guardians, no friends to lay the train of scandal or to be continually pulling them from each other’s arms.  But the first influence which crosses the walls of their paradise, the first being to whom they speak, which possesses the semblance of a human voice, is most certainly Satan and that Old Serpent, who was a liar and a slanderer from the beginning, and whose counsels will lead inevitably to the withdrawal of God’s presence and to the doom of a life of pain and labor.

There was one cloud in the heaven of their happiness.  Geoffrey was inclined to tease Asako about her native country.  His ideas about Japan were gleaned chiefly from musical comedies.  He would call his wife Yum Yum and Pitti Sing.  He would fix the end of one of her black veils under his hat, and would ask her whether she liked him better with a pigtail.

“Captain Geoffrey,” she would complain, “it is the Chinese who wear the pigtail; they are a very savage people.”

Then he would call her his little geisha, and this she resented; for she knew from the Muratas that geisha were bad women who took husbands away from their wives, and that was no joking matter.

“What nonsense!” exclaimed Geoffrey, taken aback by this sudden reproof:  “they are dear little things like you, darling, and they bring you tea and wave fans behind your head, and I would like to have twenty of them—­to wait upon you!”

He would tease her about a supposed fondness for rice, for chop-sticks, for paper umbrellas and jiujitsu. She liked him to tease her, just as a child likes to be teased, while all the time on the verge of tears.  With Asako, tears and laughter were never far apart.

“Why do you tease me because I am Japanese?” she would sob; “besides, I’m not really.  I can’t help it.  I can’t help it!”

“But, sweetheart,” her Captain Geoffrey would say, suddenly ashamed of his elephantine humour, “there’s nothing to cry about.  I would be proud to be a Japanese.  They are jolly brave people.  They gave the Russians a jolly good hiding.”

It made her feel well to hear him praise her people, but she would say: 

“No, no, they’re not.  I don’t want to be a Jap.  I don’t like them.  They’re ugly and spiteful.  Why can’t we choose what we are?  I would be an English girl—­or perhaps French,” she added, thinking of the Rue de la Paix.