damp air is bad for Mousmé. So we play Japanese draughts, and talk of England.
Sometimes Kotmasu comes in. He is convinced at last of the bona-fides of my marriage, and is as profuse in his apologies for ever having doubted the success of my experiment, as he was with his lugubrious predictions that it would never succeed.
We are always glad to see him; for since Mousmé’s illness I have been into the tea-houses, and even the town itself, very little. We hear gossip from my queer mother-in-law, but it is usually only a chronique scandaleuse of the doings of the geishas, of her friends, and last, though by no means least, of her enemies, half of whom I do not even know by name.
Kotmasu, on the other hand, has always some scrap of more or less reliable European news, which, if it does nothing else, serves as a peg on which to hang a reminiscence, or an echo to awaken old memories of Western men and things.
