the most wildly impossible soup made of sea-weed. After which there
are little fish dried in sugar, crabs in sugar, beans in sugar, and
fruits in vinegar and pepper. All this is atrocious, but above all
unexpected and unimaginable. The little women make me eat, laughing
much, with that perpetual irritating laugh, which is the laugh
peculiar to Japan,--they make me eat, according to their fashion, with
dainty chop-sticks, fingered with mannered grace. I am becoming
accustomed to their faces. The whole effect is refined,--a refinement
so utterly different from our own, that at first sight I understand
nothing of it, although in the long run it may end by pleasing me.

Suddenly there enters, like a night butterfly awakened in broad
daylight, like a rare and surprising moth, the dancing-girl from the
other compartment, the child who wore the horrible mask. No doubt she
wishes to have a look at me. She rolls her eyes like a timid kitten,
and then all at once tamed, nestles against me, with a coaxing air of
childishness, which is a delightfully transparent assumption. She is
slim, elegant, delicate, and smells sweet; drolly painted, white as
plaster, with a little circle of rouge marked very precisely in the
middle of each cheek, the mouth reddened, and a touch of gilding
outlining the under lip. As they could not whiten the back of the neck
on account of all the delicate little curls of hair growing there,
they had, in their love of exactitude, stopped the white plaster in a
straight line, which might have been cut with a knife, and in
consequence at the nape appears a square of natural skin of a deep
yellow.

An imperious note sounds on the guitar, evidently a summons! Crac!
Away she goes, the little fairy, to rejoice the drivelling fools on
the other side of the screens.