One day after Suga had gone out shopping Tomo summoned Konno and as casually as possible asked him if he was intending to marry Suga.

‘Good heavens, no. Miss Suga’s ten years older than me for one thing, and besides, she’s not strong enough to be an ordinary wife. Marriage for me means children and grandchildren; I don’t want any barren woman, thank you,’ he said, his lips quivering with a shallow smile. His main concern, his tone suggested, was lest he should mistakenly be thought to have been making advances to Suga.

‘I see … That’s all right then. You’ve got to think about your own future, you see, and if there were anything between you and Suga we should have to take steps to end it, which wouldn’t be pleasant for either of you. The master may look very easy-going but he deals with that kind of thing in no uncertain way …’

She looked Konno straight in the eyes as she spoke, with no hint of what she had heard from Miya concerning Yukitomo’s private intentions. Perceiving that Konno was not in love with Suga she had tried a high-handed approach and, as she expected, Konno’s pallid face with its silver-rimmed spectacles had shown irresolution, then begun to cringe unpleasantly as she watched.

From then on Konno’s manner towards Suga became noticeably more distant. Of Tomo’s warning he said to her not a word, though he might have been expected to pass it on to her before anyone else.

If the relationship with Suga had been a little further advanced Konno too might have had other ideas, but despite what seemed to others an almost suspicious degree of intimacy, once they were alone together Suga would keep him severely at a distance and refuse completely to relax with him. Konno, who during his life in lodgings had had relations with women older than himself, could not understand Suga’s lack of forwardness, which seemed to suggest that any ill-considered advances would be coldly thrust aside. He failed to perceive the child-wife that lurked inside the older woman, and the more she fussed over him outwardly the more he was puzzled.

Autumn came, and almost immediately Suga took to bed with the hemorrhoids that always troubled her, but Konno made no move to approach her room.

Even in his youth Yukitomo, in whom the attitudes of male superiority that derived from his Kyushu samurai stock were deeply engrained, had never shown others the type of affection in times of illness that would have taken him with tender solicitude to Suga’s bedside. Even where she lay in her room Suga could sometimes hear him scolding Tomo and the maids, out of temper at the inconvenience of having no one to attend to his needs.