Yoritomo’s sister, O’Kami San (that is to say:  the honorable Miss Kami), spoke a very little English.  This fact she had bashfully hidden from the girls on the occasion of their first meeting.  But when Billie, through Yoritomo, asked his sister to walk in the garden, she answered herself: 

“Receive thanks.  Honorable walk will confer pleasure.”

Assuredly the Japanese-English dictionaries and phrase books must all use the most stilted and ceremonious English words, so Billie thought.

“‘Receive thanks and confer pleasure!’ How absurd!”

But then Billie did not realize that the Japanese language abounds in such ceremonious words and high-sounding phrases and, in order to keep the spirit of the original, translations are generally literal.

Off they trooped down a garden path, followed by the reproachful eyes of Miss Helen Campbell, who found it a decided strain on the nerves to keep a second-hand conversation going.  Nancy lingered behind and helped her out by giving Yoritomo an account of their accident on Arakawa Ridge.  This he immediately passed on to his mother and aunt.

In the meantime, O’Kami San, trotting along beside Billie, with Mary and Elinor following behind, might have just stepped out of a Japanese fan.  She was so entirely unreal and cunning that the girls had no eyes for the rosy rain of cherry blossoms dropping from the trees, nor the lovely vista of garden with its flaming bushes of azaleas and cool green clumps of ferns.  Out of compliment to the season O’Kami San wore a robe of delicate pink embroidered all over with sprays of cherry blossoms in deeper shades.  Her obi, or sash, was of pale green silk.  Her hair was elaborately pompadoured and drawn up in the back into a large glossy roll held in place with tortoise shell pins.  No doubt it had taken hours to arrange; two, at the very least.

Billie patted her own smooth rolls serenely.

“Suppose I had to sleep with my neck on a little wooden bench every night to preserve my coiffure,” she thought.  “I think I’d just lay my head on the executioner’s block and say, ’Strike it off.  It’s not worth the trouble.’”

“Think garden pretty, O’Kami San?” began Mary, whose method of talking with the Japanese was to preserve only the framework of a sentence and drop all articles and small words.

“Much pretty.  Me—­like honorable garden and beautiful American ladee,” answered O’Kami, speaking slowly and distinctly.

English pronunciation never seemed to trouble the Japanese.  It was only choice of words and construction.

“What do you do all day, O’Kami San?” asked Elinor.

“Much honorable work,” answered the Japanese girl.  “Cook-ing; sew-ing”; she pointed to her kimono; “mu-seek; book-stu-dee.  Ah, much work to become wife.”

“You are not thinking of marrying, surely?  Your brother says you are only sixteen,” protested Mary.