She advances smiling, with an air of repressed triumph, and behind her looms M. Kangourou, in his suit of gray tweed.  Fresh salutes, and behold her on all fours, she too, before my landlady and before my neighbors.  Yves, the big Yves, who is not about to be married, stands behind me, with a comical grimace, hardly repressing his laughter—­while to give myself time to collect my ideas, I offer tea in little cups, little spittoons, and embers to the company.

Nevertheless, my discomfited air does not escape my visitors.  M. Kangourou anxiously inquires: 

“How do you like her?” And I reply in a low voice, but with great resolution: 

“Not at all!  I won’t have that one.  Never!”

I believe that this remark was almost understood in the circle around me.  Consternation was depicted on every face, jaws dropped, and pipes went out.  And now I address my reproaches to Kangourou:  “Why have you brought her to me in such pomp, before friends and neighbors of both sexes, instead of showing her to me discreetly, as if by chance, as I had wished?  What an affront you will compel me now to put upon all these polite persons!”

The old ladies (the mamma, no doubt, and aunts), prick up their ears, and M. Kangourou translates to them, softening as much as possible, my heartrending decision.  I feel really almost sorry for them; the fact is, that for women who, not to put too fine a point upon it, have come to sell a child, they have an air I was not prepared for:  I can hardly say an air of respectability (a word in use with us which is absolutely without meaning in Japan), but an air of unconscious and good-natured simplicity.  They are only doing a thing that is perfectly admissible in their world, and really it all resembles, more than I could have thought possible, a bona fide marriage.

“But what fault do you find with the little girl?” asks M. Kangourou, in consternation.

I endeavor to present the matter in the most flattering light: 

“She is very young,” I say; “and then she is too white, too much like our own women.  I wished for one with an ivory skin, just as a change.”

“But that is only the paint they have put on her, Monsieur!  Beneath it, I assure you, she is of an ivory hue.”

Yves leans toward me and whispers: 

“Look over there, brother, in that corner by the last panel; have you noticed the one who is sitting down?”

Not I. In my annoyance I had not observed her; she had her back to the light, was dressed in dark colors, and sat in the careless attitude of one who keeps in the background.  The fact is, this one pleased me much better.  Eyes with long lashes, rather narrow, but which would have been called good in any country in the world; with almost an expression, almost a thought.  A coppery tint on her rounded cheeks; a straight nose; slightly thick lips, but well modelled and with pretty corners.  A little older than Mademoiselle Jasmin, about eighteen years of age perhaps, already more of a woman.  She wore an expression of ennui, also of a little contempt, as if she regretted her attendance at a spectacle which dragged so much, and was so little amusing.