magnificent chignons in huge bows, smooth and shining as
boot-polish, and the little tea-service on the floor, the landscape
seen through the verandah, the pagoda perched among the clouds; and
over all the same affectation everywhere, in every detail. Even the
woman's melancholy voice, still to be heard behind the paper
partition, was so evidently the way they should sing, these musicians
I had so often seen painted in amazing colors on rice-paper, half
closing their dreamy eyes in the midst of impossibly large flowers.
Long before I came to it, I had perfectly pictured this Japan to
myself. Nevertheless in the reality it almost seems to be smaller,
more finicking than I had imagined it, and also much more mournful, no
doubt by reason of that great pall of black clouds hanging over us and
this incessant rain.

* * * * *

While awaiting M. Kangourou (who is dressing himself it appears, and
will be here shortly), it may be as well to begin lunch.

In the daintiest bowl imaginable, adorned with flights of storks, is
the most wildly impossible soup made of sea-weed. After which there
are little fish dried in sugar, crabs in sugar, beans in sugar, and
fruits in vinegar and pepper. All this is atrocious, but above all
unexpected and unimaginable. The little women make me eat, laughing
much, with that perpetual irritating laugh, which is the laugh
peculiar to Japan,--they make me eat, according to their fashion, with
dainty chop-sticks, fingered with mannered grace. I am becoming
accustomed to their faces. The whole effect is refined,--a refinement
so utterly different from our own, that at first sight I understand
nothing of it, although in the long run it may end by pleasing me.

Suddenly there enters, like a night butterfly awakened in broad
daylight, like a rare and surprising moth, the dancing-girl from the
other compartment, the child who wore the horrible mask. No doubt she
wishes to have a look at me. She rolls her eyes like a timid kitten,
and then all at once tamed, nestles against me, with a coaxing air of
childishness, which is a delightfully transparent assumption. She is
slim, elegant, delicate, and smells sweet; drolly painted, white as
plaster, with a little circle of rouge marked very precisely in the
middle of each cheek, the mouth reddened, and a touch of gilding
outlining the under lip. As they could not whiten the back of the neck
on account of all the delicate little cu