Mousmé is better.

At last, after weary and anxious days of waiting and watching, the crisis is past. From that mysterious land, whose borders so often touch ours in sleep and illness, in which Mousmé had almost set foot, my little wife has returned. A frail ghost of her former bright self. One who looks as though she had seen visions.

She seems more fairy-like than ever, sitting out under the verandah, wrapped up in an elaborate dressing-gown of silver-grey silk with a delicate rose-pink lining. She doesn’t look a whit older—Japanese women never appear so till they are quite old—only more like some toy woman taken bodily from off a screen or jar decorated[180] by an artist drawing his inspiration from models of the highest types.

There seems something almost unreal in the slight figure in its quaint Eastern dress, and the dainty ways that are returning to her one by one with the strength which comes back so slowly.

Oka’s wife is delighted. She is very fond of the little mistress, who is so gay and childlike and amiable. I shall be sorry when the time comes for us to leave old Oka, with his ugly, amiable, yellow face, and his wife, who is, as are many of the lower-class women, really more than passably good-looking, though verging upon forty.

We sit out almost all day long; and when I am obliged to leave Mousmé to attend to business in the town, Oka’s wife sits within call, and Mousmé looks at the pictures in the illustrated papers and magazines Lou has from time to time sent me;[181] or pores over a tattered copy of a rudimentary English spelling-book and grammar combined, which Chen Yo, the publisher of the principal paper, put aside for me as a great curiosity which he had bought one day.

Mousmé is learning English well. Her accent is still peculiar, of course, though her vocabulary is greatly extended. I talk to her as much as I can, for soon English will be the only language she will hear.

These are ever-to-be-remembered days, spent in my Japanese home overlooking the wonderful garden, full of brilliance of flower, earth, life and sky. I smoke, and Mousmé plays her guitar; and she sings in a voice into which love and patience have translated greater harmony and sweetness than any other woman’s voice that I have heard during the last four years—
“What shall I sing to thee, my love?
In the garden where the moonbeams play,
 
And pipe the nightingale and dove,
And plash the fountain’s silver spray.
“What shall I bring to thee, my own?
Visions of heaven’s mansions fair;
Never had king a truer throne
Than my heart’s casket rich and rare.”

“Sing on, little Mousmé; there are other verses of your little love-song,” I say.

But she is tired, and, unconsciously like a European prima donna, only sings the last two lines over again—
“Never had king a truer throne
Than my heart’s casket rich and rare.”

“True, Mousmé, true,” I say, half to myself, as the song loses itself in the air. But she catches the words, and smiles.

The wet season is coming on, alas! before I can leave, and our evenings beneath the verandah will be less frequent. It is not nearly so pleasant indoors, but the[183] damp air is bad for Mousmé. So we play Japanese draughts, and talk of England.

Sometimes Kotmasu comes in. He is convinced at last of the bona-fides of my marriage, and is as profuse in his apologies for ever having doubted the success of my experiment, as he was with his lugubrious predictions that it would never succeed.

We are always glad to see him; for since Mousmé’s illness I have been into the tea-houses, and even the town itself, very little. We hear gossip from my queer mother-in-law, but it is usually only a chronique scandaleuse of the doings of the geishas, of her friends, and last, though by no means least, of her enemies, half of whom I do not even know by name.

Kotmasu, on the other hand, has always some scrap of more or less reliable European news, which, if it does nothing else, serves as a peg on which to hang a reminiscence, or an echo to awaken old memories of Western men and things.
 
The evenings we spend together are far from being uninteresting; and Mousmé, who has picked up the art of conversation wonderfully, is delighted to intrude her quaint ideas upon us. She is burning with curiosity concerning the strange country called England, which Kotmasu, willing enough to shine even in the eyes of a married woman, and she my wife, pretends he knows so well.

He is really very funny in his descriptions sometimes. In a sense they are fairly correct; but they are, just like all Japanese pictures, lacking in the most elementary perspective. It is not because his perceptive faculties are lacking, but only that they follow the national groove, the worship of the minute to the exclusion of broader effects.

Mousmé, no doubt with a desire to be in the possession of two opinions, addresses a multitude of questions to him when, as is  the case to-night, he is spending the evening with us.

“What do the women wear? How do they dress? Are their obis as handsome as mine?” and so on.

Kotmasu endeavors to describe the attire of my fellow-countrymen, blundering magnificently over its hidden intricacies.

“It is dull, very dull indeed,” he explains, with an apologetic glance in my direction, as if fearful that I should seek to upset his statement. “There are no colours worn—at least,” he hastens to add, with another glance over in my direction through the tiny cloud of bluish-grey smoke his absurd tobacco-pipe permits him to eject, “not colours like ours. Not like you are wearing, Mousmé.”

I laugh to myself, partially at the perplexed expression on Mousmé’s face, and partially at the idea of her promenading[186] in England in all the glory of a canary-coloured obi, plum-coloured gown embroidered in gold thread, and a bifurcated garment of ivory satin.

“The women wear no obis,” continues Kotmasu, complacently.

“No obis!” ejaculates Mousmé, evidently incredulous.

“No. Sometimes the children do.”

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