Asako was crying very gently.  She felt the touch of her cousin’s hand on her arm.  The intellectual Miss Sadako also was weeping, the tears furrowing her whitened complexion.  The Japanese are a very emotional race.  The women love tears; and even the men are not averse from this very natural expression of feeling, which our Anglo-Saxon schooling has condemned as babyish.  Mrs. Fujinami continued,—­

“I saw her a few days before you were born.  They lived in a little house on the bank of the river.  One could see the boats passing.  It was very damp and cold.  She talked all the time of her baby.  ’If it is a boy,’ she said, ’everybody will be happy; if it is a girl, Fujinami San will be very anxious for the family’s sake; and the fortune-tellers say that it will surely be a little girl.  But,’ she used to say, ’I could play better with a little girl; I know what makes them laugh!’ When you were born she became very ill.  She never spoke again, and in a few days she died.  Your father became like a madman, he locked the house, and would not see any of us; and as soon as you were strong enough, he took you away in a ship.”

Sadako placed in front of her cousin the roll of silk, and said,—­

“This is Japanese obi (sash).  It belonged to your mother.  She gave it to my mother a short time before you were born; for she said, ’It is too bright for me now; when I have my baby, I shall give up society, and I shall spend all my time with my children.’  My mother gives it to you for your mother’s sake.”

It was a wonderful work of art, a heavy golden brocade, embroidered with fans, and on each fan a Japanese poem and a little scene from the olden days.

“She was very fond of this obi, she chose the poems herself.”

But Asako was not admiring the beautiful workmanship.  She was thinking of the mother’s heart which had beat for her under that long strip of silk, the little Japanese mother who “would have known how to make her laugh.”  Tears were falling very quietly on to the old sash.

The two Japanese women saw this; and with the instinctive tact of their race, they left her alone face to face with this strange introduction to her mother’s personality.

There is a peculiar pathos about the clothes of the dead.  They are so nearly a part of our bodies that it seems unnatural almost that they should survive with the persistence of inanimate things, when we who gave them the semblance of life are far more dead than they.  It would be more seemly, perhaps, if all these things which have belonged to us so intimately were to perish with us in a general suttee.  But the mania for relics would never tolerate so complete a disappearance of one whom we had loved; and our treasuring of hair and ornaments and letters is a desperate—­and perhaps not an entirely vain—­attempt to check the liberated spirit in its leap for eternity.

Asako found in that old garment of her mother’s a much more faithful reflection of the life which had been transmitted to her, than the stiff photograph could ever realise.  She had chosen the poems herself.  Asako must get them transcribed and translated; for they would be a sure indication of her mother’s character.  Already the daughter could see that her mother too must have loved rich and beautiful things, happiness and laughter.