“At the Parker House, do you mean?” I asked experimentally, watching her face to see what degree of confusion would be recorded there. If there was any, it was too infinitesimal to be measured, and she said, “Was it at the Parker House? Yes, of course, that’s right. She was exquisite! We were all quite enchanted and I was greatly set up to be able to say that even though I didn’t know her, I did at least know her companion. She looked as though she had stepped out of a fairy tale. You would have fallen in love with her, Berthe!”

The Countess gave me an indulgent spanking. “What do you mean, you wicked creature, keeping all of this from me? No, no evasions! I want to know all about her. Oh, such a betrayal!”

I explained that Kakosan was a stenographer in some firm, the exact nature of which I had never determined, for she always referred mysteriously to “the commodity” which might have been anything from ink to corsets. I told them also that she was the daughter of a nobleman in exile, a cultivated patriarchal gentleman who preserved all the customs of his country and his class, writing hokku, painting water-colors of the Yanagawa from his faithful memory of it, sitting beside his pool in the American duplicate of his garden in Kyushu, in contemplation of the Zen-Buddha to whom, each day, he paid his ceremonial respects in the tea-house. As I observed the mounting interest in the Countess’ face, I regretted I had made Nathan’s mistress sound so interesting for I had no wish to bring her to the salon. My reason was that I could not trust her to exercise any restraint in her conversation. The several times that I had seen her (in my exile, I had welcomed her invitations to the movies), she had been naïve enough to tell me, when we had stopped at Schrafft’s for raspberry frappés, about her lovers previous to Nathan whose attentions she described with a thoroughness that made me blush. I had no reason to suppose that she would be less candid with the Countess and the Boston girls.

“But she sounds charming!” cried the Countess. “Just imagine a real Samurai daughter simply at large in Boston! I’ve never heard anything so exotic! I command you to bring her to hear the Scarlatti on Friday, and if you do not, Euphrysone, I’ll think up some really humiliating punishment for you. I’ll make you spend a whole evening with Kalenkoff playing omber!”