beautiful young lady, too, live like a doll in a house of paper and bamboo? And with slender metal chopsticks did she pick up grains of rice out of a teacup as big as the palm of your hand with a blue flower painted on it and eat them? Such doubts, together with an affectionate smile, seemed ever and anon to come and go in his eyes. If this was amusing to Akiko, it was at the same time gratifying. So every time his surprised gaze fell to her feet, her slender little rose-colored dancing pumps went sliding the more lightly over the slippery floor.
But finally the officer seemed to notice that this kitten-like young lady showed signs of fatigue, and peering into her face with kindly eyes, he asked,
“Shall we go on dancing?”
“ Non, merci ,” said Akiko in excitement, this time clearly.
Then the French naval officer, continuing the steps of the waltz, wove his way through the waves of lace and flowers moving back and forth and right and left, and guided her leisurely up to the chrysanthemums in vases by the wall. And after the last revolution, he seated her neatly in a chair there and, having once thrown out his chest in his military uniform, again respectfully made her a deep Japanese bow.
Then after dancing a polka and a mazurka, Akiko took the arm of this French naval officer and went down the stairs between the walls of white and yellow and pink chrysanthemums to a large hall.
Here in the midst of swallowtails and white shoulders moving to and fro unceasingly, many tables loaded with silver and glass utensils were piled high with meat and truffles, or pinnacled with towers of sandwiches and ice-cream, or built up into pyramids of pomegranates and figs. Especially beautiful was a gilt lattice with skilfully made artificial grape vines twining their green leaves through it on the wall at one side of the room