‘Yes, you may be right.’ A shiver ran over Tomo’s skin as though it had been touched by the naked blade of a sword. The same tremor had passed over her from time to time as she had watched Suga dance.

As she gazed at the innocent body of this girl who, for all the provocative movements – the inclinations of the head and the elusive movements of the body – with which she suggested the amorous affairs of men and women on the stage, was in fact still half a child, Tomo found herself wondering in what way this immature girl would be broken in, how she would be transformed, once they took her to their home and delivered her into the practiced hands of Shirakawa; unconsciously she closed her eyes and held her breath, only to see a vision of her husband and Suga with limbs intertwined that brought the blood rushing to her head and made her open her eyes wide again as though to dispel a nightmare. Pity welled up at the sorry fate of the girl fluttering before her like a great butterfly, and with it a jealousy that flowed about her body in a rapid, scorching stream.

Her mind that under the pressure of the search had felt nothing so long as no suitable woman had presented herself was suddenly assailed with a yearning like the hunger that comes with the ending of a fast. The pain of having publicly to hand over her husband to another gnawed at her within. To Tomo, a husband who would quite happily cause his wife such suffering was a monster of callousness. Yet since to serve her husband was the creed around which her life revolved, to rebel against his outrages would have been to destroy herself as well; besides, there was the love that was still stronger than that creed. Tormented by the one-sided love that gave and gave with no reward, she had no idea, even so, of leaving him. It was true that Shirakawa’s money and property, their daughter Etsuko, and their son Michimasa now living with relatives in the country were bonds that held her, but still stronger was the longing, whatever the sacrifice, to have her husband understand through and through the innermost desires and emotions of her heart. The longing was something that no one other than Shirakawa could fulfill.

At the idea of another woman, this young girl Suga, coming between herself and her husband, it seemed to Tomo that the husband with whom even in the past she had never been able to effect real contact was moving still farther away.

The night after she received his reply conveying approval of the photograph of Suga that she had sent, Tomo dreamed that she killed her husband and woke in fright at the sound of her own cry.