Mrs. Fujinami assists her husband to dress, holding each garment ready for him to slip into, like a well-trained valet.  Mr. Fujinami does not speak to her.  When his belt has been adjusted, and a watch with a gold fob thrust into its interstice, he steps down from the veranda, slides his feet into a pair of geta, and strolls out into the garden.

Mr. Fujinami’s garden is a famous one.  It is a temple garden many centuries old; and the eyes of the initiated may read in the miniature landscape, in the grouping of shrubs and rocks, in the sudden glimpses of water, and in the bare pebbly beaches, a whole system of philosophic and religious thought worked out by the patient priests of the Ashikaga period, just as the Gothic masons wrote their version of the Bible history in the architecture of their cathedrals.

But for the ignorant, including its present master, it was just a perfect little park, with lawns six feet square and ancient pine trees, with impenetrable forests which one could clear at a bound, with gorges, waterfalls, arbours for lilliputian philanderings and a lake round whose tiny shores were represented the Eight Beautiful Views of the Lake of Biwa near Kyoto.

The bungalow mansion of the family lies on a knoll overlooking the lake and the garden valley, a rambling construction of brown wood with grey scale-like tiles, resembling a domesticated dragon stretching itself in the sun.

Indeed, it is not one house but many, linked together by a number of corridors and spare rooms.  For Mr. and Mrs. Fujinami live in one wing, their son and his wife in another, and also Mr. Ito, the lawyer, who is a distant relative and a partner in the Fujinami business.  Then, on the farther side of the house, near the pebble drive and the great gate, are the swarming quarters of the servants, the rickshaw men, and Mr. Fujinami’s secretaries.  Various poor relations exist unobserved in unfrequented corners; and there is the following of University students and professional swashbucklers which every important Japanese is bound to keep, as an advertisement of his generosity, and to do his dirty work for him.  A Japanese family mansion is very like a hive—­of drones.

Nor is this the entire population of the Fujinami yashiki.  Across the garden and beyond the bamboo grove is the little house of Mr. Fujinami’s stepbrother and his wife; and in the opposite corner, below the cherry-orchard, is the inkyo, the dower house, where old Mr. Fujinami Gennosuke, the retired Lord—­who is the present Mr. Fujinami’s father by adoption only—­watches the progress of the family fortunes with the vigilance of Charles the Fifth in the cloister of Juste.

* * * * *

Mr. Fujinami Gentaro shuffled his way towards a little room like a kind of summer-house, detached from the main building and overlooking the lake and garden from the most favourable point of vantage.