Mousmé inclines to paying her mother a visit; Kotmasu to visiting a little playhouse down below in Nagasaki, where some new geishas from Yeddo are to make their début.
I am not so fond of my mother-in-law as I should be, nor of my perplexingly numerous sisters and brothers-in-law, both small and great. The former I suspect of rapacity, an insatiable appetite for “handsome presents,” which, if not always very costly in European eyes, are certainly numerous, and range from rouge fin (imported from Paris) and blanc perle to gay-hued obis and handsome hairpins of tortoise-shell, or of bronze with carved jade heads.
Fancy supplying one’s mother-in-law with rouge! But it was Kotmasu’s doing. He was evidently in her confidence; for he said one day, just as my marriage arrangements were nearing completion:
“You give Madame Choto some rouge.
