Page:My Japanese Wife.djvu/221

Rh me, that it is becoming quite the fashion for women and girls in England to smoke mild and scented cigarettes sub rosa.

Mousmé knocks out the ashes from her pipe on the edge of her little ember bowl, with a metallic pin, pin, pan, and then, taking off her day garment of plum-coloured brocade, slips into a dressing-gown robe of blue linen, with wide sleeves and an obi of powder-blue muslin, which she knots in the inevitable exaggerated butterfly bow round her supple waist.

I shall, after all, be sorry to leave this strange Eastern home of mine, with its queer noises at the dead of night, and its fragrant garden, the sweet perfume from which drifts in and even penetrates through our blue mosquito-curtain of stout gauze, when we leave, as we frequently do, the panels of our outer wall pushed back for air.

Then there is the trouble of packing;