Was Kiku happy?  Nay, you should ask, Can that word express her feelings?  She had obeyed her parents:  she could do nothing higher or more fraught with happiness.  She was to be a wife—­woman’s highest honor and a Japanese woman’s only aim.  She was to marry a noble by name, nature and achievement, with health, family, wealth and honor.  Kiku lived in a new world of anticipation and of vision, the gate of which the Japanese call iro, and we love.  At times, as she tried on for the twentieth time her white silk robe and costly girdle, she fell into a reverie, half sad and half joyful.  She thought of leaving her mother alone with no daughter, and then Kiku’s bright eyes dimmed and her bosom heaved.  Then she thought of living in a new home, in a new house, with new faces.  What if her mother-in-law should be severe or jealous?  Kiku’s cheek paled.  What if Taro should achieve some great exploit, and she share his joy as did the honorable women of old?  What if his former position of beloved page to the Sho-gun should give her occasional access to the highest ladies in the land, the female courtiers of the castle?  Her eyes flashed.

The wedding-night came, seeming to descend out of the starry heavens from the gods.  Marriages rarely take place in the daytime in Japan.  The solemn and joyful hour of evening, usually about nine o’clock, is the time for marriage—­as it often is for burial—­in Japan.  In the starlight of a June evening the bride set forth on her journey to her intended husband’s home, as is the invariable custom.  Her toilet finished, she stepped out of her childhood’s home to take her place in the norimono or palanquin which, borne on the shoulders of four men, was to convey her to her future home.

Just as Kiku stands in the vestibule of her father’s house let us photograph her for you.  A slender maiden of seventeen, with cheeks of carnation; eyes that shine under lids not so broadly open as the Caucasian maiden’s, but black and sparkling; very small hands with tapering fingers, and very small feet encased in white mitten-socks; her black hair glossy as polished jet, dressed in the style betokening virginity, and decked with a garland of blossoms.  Her robe of pure white silk folds over her bosom from right to left, and is bound at the waist by the gold-embroidered girdle, which is supported by a lesser band of scarlet silken crape, and is tied into huge loops behind.  The skirt of the dress sweeps in a trail.  Her under-dress is of the finest and softest white silk.  In her hands she carries a half-moon-shaped cap or veil of floss silk.  Its use we shall see hereafter.  She salutes her cousin, who, clad in ceremonial dress with his ever-present two swords, is waiting to accompany her in addition to her family servants and bearers, and steps into the norimono.