evening, and delays our retiring to rest under the dark-blue gauze net
for a good quarter of an hour; while the cicalas on the roof seem to mock
us with their ceaseless song.

All this, which I should find amusing in any one else,--any one I loved
--irritates me in her.




CHAPTER XLIV

TENDER MINISTRATIONS

September 11th.

A week has passed very quietly, during which I have written nothing.

By degrees I am becoming accustomed to my Japanese household, to the
strangeness of the language, costumes, and faces. For the last three
weeks no letters have arrived from Europe; they have no doubt miscarried,
and their absence contributes, as is usually the case, to throw a veil of
oblivion over the past.

Every day, therefore, I climb up to my villa, sometimes by beautiful
starlit nights, sometimes through downpours of rain. Every morning as
the sound of Madame Prune's chanted prayer rises through the
reverberating air, I awake and go down toward the sea, by grassy pathways
full of dew.