Rings sparkled on Sadako’s fingers, and she wore a diamond ornament across her sash; but neither their taste nor their quality impressed her cousin.  Her face was of the same ivory tint as Asako’s, but it was hidden under a lavish coating of liquid powder.  This hideous embellishment covers not only the Mongolian yellow, which every Japanese woman seems anxious to hide, but also the natural and charming nuances of young skin, under a white monotonous surface like a mask of clay.  Painted roses bloomed on the girl’s cheeks.  The eyebrows were artificially darkened as well as the lines round the eyes.  The face and its expression, in fact, were quite obscured by cosmetics; and Miss Fujinami was wrapped in a cloud of cheap scent like a servant-girl on her evening out.

She spoke English well.  In fact, at school she had achieved a really brilliant career, and she had even attended a University for a time with the intention of reading for a degree, an attainment rare among Japanese girls.  But overwork brought on its inevitable result.  Books had to be banished, and glasses interposed to save the tired eyes from the light.  It was a bitter disappointment for Sadako, who was a proud and ambitious girl, and it had not improved her disposition.

After the first formalities Asako was shown round the house.  The sameness of the rooms surprised her.  There was nothing to distinguish them except the different woods used in their ceilings and walls, a distinction which betrayed its costliness and its taste only to the practised eye.  Each room was spotless and absolutely bare, with golden tatami, rice-straw mats with edgings of black braid, fixed into the flooring, by whose number the size of a Japanese room is measured.  Asako admired the pale white shoji, the sliding windows of opaque glowing paper along the side of the room open to the outdoor light, the fusuma or sliding partitions between room and room, set in the framework of the house, some of them charmingly painted with sketches of scenery, flowers, or people, some of them plain cream-coloured boards flecked with tiny specks of gold.

Nothing broke the sameness of these rooms except the double alcove, or tokonoma with its inevitable hanging picture, its inevitable ornament, and its spray of blossom.  Between the double niche stood that pillar of wood which Sadako explained as being the soul of the room, the leading feature from which its character was taken, being either plain and firm, or twisted and ornate, or else still unshaped, with the bosses of amputated branches seared and black protesting against confinement.  The tokonoma, as the word suggests, must originally have been the sleeping-place of the owner of the room, for it certainly is the only corner in a Japanese house which is secured from draughts.  But perhaps it was respect for invisible spirits which drove the sleeper eventually to abandon his coign of vantage to the service of aesthetic beauty, and to stretch himself on the open floor.