Page:My Japanese Wife.djvu/109

Rh Strand, English Illustrated, and a copy of the Universal Review. This last is a veritable El Dorado of pictures, and provokes exclamations of delight when Mousmé turns the pages over. Only there is so much she cannot understand.

One particular picture in a number of the English Illustrated, a group of ladies at an evening party, mystifies her immensely.

“Why are all these women cut out in the middle?” she asks with a puzzled expression. “Are they all born like that?”

“No,” I reply.

“Then do they make themselves like that?” glancing at her own slender though by no means exaggerated figure.

“Yes; they make themselves so, I suppose. It is a custom of our nation, and other European nations,” I explain as best I can.

“Oh!” with another look at the