Page:My Japanese Wife.djvu/143

Rh air of the scented garden; her elaborate coiffure, with its many pins, a striking contrast to the négligée of her plum-coloured kimono with its sprays of bamboo in gold thread. Against her bare little throat and dimpled shoulders she pressed a wealth of iris and lotus blooms and tender green shoots of the slenderest bamboo, her face peeping out elfish and smiling from the midst.

“These are for you, Cy-reel,” she said, laughing and casting the brilliant blossoms on to the floor in a patch of sunlight at my feet. “Now den what have you for me?”

It is difficult to resist Mousmé when she pulls one’s face down to her own smiling one, and throws slender but wonderfully tenacious little arms round one’s neck.

Mousmé, since she married, has lost some of the shyness for the “velly much rich Englishman” who had so strange a fancy