“I have been to school,” she explained, with a delicate assumption of dignity. “I have seen the map”—the Japanese maps are marvellous things, some of them—“I know where the mail-boats go. But there are so many countries in the way. How do they get there?”
All this in Japanese, of course, whilst Kotmasu talked to her brother in an undertone of the latest addition to the ranks of the Nagasaki geishas, a girl trained in Yeddo. And the other ladies sipped their tea and talked to the other men, who were nonentities to me.
Kotmasu had finished his jokes about the geishas, and became, perhaps, aware of my monopoly of Miss Hyacinth—whose name indicated a far less voyant flower than Western minds would associate with it—so he said, somewhat abruptly, “We must go.”
For a moment Mousmé’s small, shapely
