One night, Asako awoke to find that the bed beside her was empty, and that the paper shoji was pushed aside.  Nervous and anxious, she rose and stood in the dark veranda outside the room.  A cold wind was blowing in from some aperture in the amado.  This was unusual, for a Japanese house in its night attire is hermetically sealed.

Suddenly Sadako appeared from the direction of the wind.  Her hair was disheveled.  She wore a dark cloak over her parti-coloured night kimono.  By the dim light of the andon (a rushlight in a square paper box), Asako could see that the cloak was spotted with rain.

“I have been to benjo,” said Sadako nervously.

“You have been out in the rain,” contradicted her cousin.  “You are wet through.  You will catch cold.”

“Sa!  Damare! (Be quiet!)” whispered Sadako, as she threw her cloak aside, “do not talk so loud.  See!” She drew from her breast a short sword in a sheath of shagreen.  “If you speak one word, I kill you with this.”

“What have you done?” asked Asako, trembling.

“What I wished to do,” was the sullen answer.

“You have been with Sekine?” Asako mentioned the student’s name.

Sadako nodded in assent.  Then she began to cry, hiding her face in her kimono sleeve.

“Do you love him?” Asako could not help asking.

“Of course, I love him,” cried Sadako, starting up from her sorrow.  “You see me.  I am no more virgin.  He is my life to me.  Why cannot I love him?  Why cannot I be free like men are free to love as they wish?  I am new woman.  I read Bernard Shaw.  I find one law for men in Japan, and another law for women.  But I will break that law.  I have made Sekine my lover, because I am free.”

Asako could never have imagined her proud, inhuman cousin reduced to this state of quivering emotion.  Never before had she seen a Japanese soul laid bare.

“But you will marry Sekine, Sada dear; and then you will be happy.”

“Marry Sekine!” the girl hissed, “marry a boy with no money and leave you to be the Fujinami heiress, when I am promised to the Governor of Osaka, who will be home Minister when the next Governor comes!”

“Oh, don’t do that,” urged Asako, her English sentimentalism flooding back across her mind.  “Don’t marry a man whom you don’t love.  You say you are a new woman.  Marry Sekine.  Marry the man whom you love.  Then you will be happy.”

“Japanese girls are never happy,” groaned her cousin.

Asako gasped.  This morality confused her.

“But that would be a mortal sin,” she said.  “Then you could never be happy.”

“We cannot be happy.  We are Fujinami,” said Sadako gravely.  “We are cursed.  The old woman of Akabo said that it is a very bad curse.  I do not believe superstition.  But I believe there is a curse.  You also, you have been unhappy, and your father and mother.  We are cursed because of the women.  We have made so much money from poor women.  They are sold to men, and they suffer in pain and die so that we become rich.  It is a very bad inge.  So they say in Akabo, that we Fujinami have a fox in our family.  It brings us money; but it makes us unhappy.  In Akabo, even poor people will not marry with the Fujinami, because we have the fox.”