40
Eminent Authors of Japan
- Wife.—Well, please go out of the room.
- Husband.—No, carry your bathing-clothes to the dressing-shed on the beach and change there.
- Wife.—Won’t people stare?
- Husband.—Oh, be quick! It may begin to rain again if you don’t hurry.
- (They both leave the room. Just about as long as it would take them to get downstairs, the rain begins to fall again. The sound of a phonograph is heard in some near by room. As if stepping to the time of the music, they both enter the room again, and without speaking a word, they seat themselves and gaze vacantly out into the sky. Both heave a deep sigh, which is followed by a long silence.
- The husband then goes to his bag and takes a guide-book from it, and commences to turn over its leaves. The wife stretches for a pillow and prepares to take a nap.)
- Husband.—Oh, for goodness sake don’t go to sleep! If you do, what on earth am I going to do to kill time?
- Wife.—You had better sleep too.
- Husband.—Isn’t it rather unreasonable to expect me to go to sleep now after sleeping continuously for fourteen hours from 7 last night until 9 this morning? As if we couldn’t find anything to do but sleep! You seem to forget that we are at one of the famous summer-resorts in Shonan, and that we are paying as much as five yen a day at this hotel after taking a long and expensive train-journey
