just right, made a perfect picture of an old Japanese poem:
“Between bent branches, a silver sickle swings aloft in youthful incompleteness, unknowing of its coming day of glory.”
Oh, I did love all the outdoors of that home, from the very first moment that I saw it!
Much of my time was spent on one or the other of our three big porches, for Mother loved them almost as much as I did, and we used to go out the first thing after breakfast, she with her sewing and I with the newspaper. In order to improve my English I read the paper every day, and I found it very interesting. I always turned first to the list of divorces in the court news. It was such a surprising thing to me that more women than men should be seeking for freedom. One day I told Mother that I felt sorry for the husbands.
“Why?” she asked. “It is as often the fault of the husband as the wife, I think. Isn’t it so in Japan?”
“But after choosing for herself it must be hard for her wifely pride to acknowledge failure,” I replied.
“How about the man?” said Mother.
“He sees, and wants, and beckons;
She blushes, and smiles, and comes—
or not, as she pleases. That is her part: to come or not to come.”
“Why, I thought it was the custom in American marriages for the woman to select,” I said, somewhat surprised; for I, with most Japanese people of that day, so interpreted the constant references in books and papers to the American custom of “women choosing their own husbands.” It was one of many exaggerated ideas that we had of the dominant spirit of American women and the submissive attitude of American men. In the conversation that
