But in the Boston houses, she was remote from anything worldly or anything Occidental, and I, along with everyone else, was captivated afresh each time my eyes came to rest on her dexterously wrought face as, when a conversation was in progress into which she could not enter, her golden mask became immovable and the eyes showed her to be humble before her intellectual superiors while the proud arch of her neck showed that the nobility of her blood forbade her too free participation in the meaningless talk of people who were “without tea.” She was apparently the “real thing” and seeing her thus, I longed for Nathan to possess her forever as the reward for his generous overlooking of her faults. But the moment she dropped her “company manners” and exchanged a few words with me in private, I hoped that the affair would be swiftly over. The repugnance I sometimes felt for her (when she revealed herself as being so far from the “real thing”) was the kind one feels toward anything that is not true to its origin if its origin is admirable or attractive: the book that begins well and peters out in mawkishness, the picture which at first seems profound until, on further study, we find that it has only the virtue of brilliant draftsmanship. She used only as ornaments the Samurai code, her father’s gentlemanly pursuits of religion and art, and they were as removable as the flowers in her hair.

Nathan, feeling that he was required to justify his love of her to me (rather, to himself, for he was sometimes agonized by the discrepancy between his vast love and its mean, elusive object) often denied that she was unchaste and stupid, not stating his denial with a negative but offering me instead instances of her talents which opposed and triumphed over her defects. He did not say, “She is not stupid,” but he said, “In some ways, she is very intelligent,” and as an illustration of her insight, he told me that she had once observed something in him he believed he had perfectly concealed. “No, really,” he said, “since I’m so generous with her, how could she know that I’m a miser?” I did not point out that the very energy of his generosity gave him away. Nor did he say that she was not promiscuous, but that she had been “misled.” At one time, he would declare that she was not a harlot because she had been in love with each of her bedfellows. At another time, in a fit of jealousy of all those unknown possessors of her, he said, “She has never been affected by any of it. I am quite sure this is the first time she has been in love.”