To Asako the rooms seemed all the same.  Each gave the same impression of spotlessness and nudity.  Each was stiffly rectangular like the honey squares fitted into a hive.  Above all, there was nothing about any of them to indicate their individual use, or the character of the person to whom they were specially assigned.  No dining-room, or drawing-room, or library.

“Where is your bedroom?” asked Asako, with a frank demand for that sign of sisterhood among Western girls; “I should so like to see it.”

“I generally sleep,” answered the Japanese girl, “in that room at the corner where we have been already, where the bamboo pictures are.  This is the room where father and mother sleep.”

They were standing on the balcony outside the apartment where Asako had first been received.

“But where are the beds?” she asked.

Sadako went to the end of the balcony, and threw open a big cupboard concealed in the outside of the house.  It was full of layers of rugs, thick, dark and wadded.

“These are the beds,” smiled the Japanese cousin.  “My brother Takeshi has a foreign bed in his room; but my father does not like them, or foreign clothes, or foreign food, or anything foreign.  He says the Japanese things are best for the Japanese.  But he is very old-fashioned.”

“Japanese style looks nicer,” said Asako, thinking how big and vulgar a bedstead would appear in that clean emptiness and how awkwardly its iron legs would trample on the straw matting; “but isn’t it draughty and uncomfortable?”

“I like the foreign beds best,” said Sadako; “my brother has let me try his.  It is very soft.”

So in this country of Asako’s fathers, a bedstead was lent for trial as though it had been some fascinating novelty, a bicycle or a piano.

The kitchen appealed most to the visitor.  It was the only room to her mind which had any individuality of its own.  It was large, dark and high, full of servant-girls scuttering about like little mice, who bowed and then fled when the two ladies came in.  The stoves for boiling the rice interested Asako, round iron receptacles like coppers, each resting on a brick fireplace.  Everything was explained to her:  the high dressers hung with unfamiliar implements in white metal and white wood:  the brightly labelled casks of sake and shoyu (sauce) waiting in the darkness like the deputation of a friendly society in its insignia of office:  the silent jars of tea, greenish in colour and ticketed with strange characters, the names of the respective tea-gardens:  the iron kettle hanging on gibbet chains from the top of the ceiling over a charcoal fire sunk in the floor; the tasteful design of the commonest earthenware bowl:  the little board and chopper for slicing the raw fish:  the clean white rice-tubs with their brass bindings polished and shining:  the odd shape and entirely Japanese character which distinguished the most ordinary things,