Kakosan had been an immediate success on the first Friday she had gone to the Countess’. Her conduct, of which I had been uncharitably dubious, was exemplary and her beauty, set off by a yellow satin dress embroidered with white flowers and a white carnation in her hair, distracted everyone so much from the music that the Countess was a little reserved in her conversation afterwards and we left rather earlier than usual. But Berthe von Happel bore no one a grudge and in a very short time she appeared at the Fridays and the Saturdays as often as I did. Likewise, she was taken up by Hopestill, and even Miss Pride, on one occasion, invited her to tea, though she confessed afterwards to me that she “found it a very pretty head but uncommonly empty.”

If I had not let it be known that Kakosan was a typist, no one would have suspected that she had any other occupation than that of arranging flowers in a bowl or playing jackstones in a garden complete with torii and tea-house. For she was one of those people who have the enviable knack of keeping their addresses a dark secret without appearing to hide anything, of answering ambiguously or not at all questions about activities, backgrounds, preferences, antipathies. If someone said to her, “Where did you live before you came here?” she would reply, “My father, you see, has copied his villa on the Yanagawa. You should see it! He is a great gardener. And how sorry he is he cannot have the tsubaki in this country he loved so much in his beautiful homeland. Do you know what it is? It is red like fire and sometimes it blooms in the snow. But he has some of the Japanese flowers, you know, wistaria and cherry trees and iris. He has to have flowers, of course, for he is a Zen-Buddhist and must decorate his tea-house. And do you know that even though it never snows where his villa is, just as soon as winter comes, he covers the lanterns with straw mats as he used to do in Kyushu?” A persistent busybody, charmed with this information but nevertheless determined to know whether the villa was in California or Florida or Louisiana, might say, “Where did you say he has his villa?” As if she had not heard the inquiry, she would go on, “Oh, yes, and he has two red pines which he sprays twice a year, for it is the custom to remove every single dead needle.” This was a side of Kakosan that I never saw when she was with Nathan or when she and I made our expeditions to the movies. With us, she talked only of her chief interests which were the “spirits,” film stars, and some disreputable young men with whom she often conversed in the Common on her way home from work on a subject she called “nationals” and which we translated roughly as “politics.” Or she would tell us the little adventures that took place in her office which sounded so remarkably like those I had heard from my classmates at the Back Bay Business College that I automatically envisaged Mrs. Hinkel as I listened to her.