According to what the maids had told the gardener, there were three maids living in at present, while it was Miss Suga who attended to the master’s personal needs. When he gave parties or otherwise entertained at home, geishas and waitresses were summoned from the Shimbashi and Yanagibashi districts to wait on the guests, and there was no real need to bring in yet another maid. The mistress, being a long-suffering woman, kept everything to herself of course, and Etsuko was only too glad to have someone else to play with, but it was most unlikely that the girl would remain simply a maid. Almost certainly she would be seduced and installed before long as a concubine. Granted all this, what could Miss Suga be feeling about it? From the mistress’ point of view, with Suga in the house it made little difference whether there was one concubine or two. But if the master was getting tired of Suga and thinking of installing a new girl in her place, how much longer would Suga be permitted to live a life of ease as though she were a daughter of the house?

After all, the master was fond of women – even though promotion had in fact taken him no farther than a reasonably influential position in the Metropolitan Police Agency, was he not used to summoning geishas from the best houses in Shimbashi like some younger member of the aristocracy? – and he could probably twist an unsophisticated girl like Suga around his little finger with no trouble at all.

Timid and naïvely trusting though she was, Suga’s mother could not help bridling at the malice that lurked in the latter part of this report. She felt an intense anguish at this further proof of the envious slander directed at Suga from behind the scenes.

Suga might be negative and lacking in vitality in some ways, but, even as a child, she could never have been called stupid; she was a straightforward, unspoiled, tradesman’s daughter who loved her mother and was quick to learn at dancing school. If only her parents had managed their affairs properly, who could tell what an advantageous match she might have made? To have put her into service with the Shirakawas in Fukushima in the summer of her fifteenth year, before she was even a real woman, was the act of a mother so heartless as hardly to deserve the name. Nevertheless, Suga seemed to feel sorry for the wretched parent thus obliged to sell her daughter, and though she never came to the house herself, she was sufficiently mindful of her family to send them, via others, presents of money and things to eat.