As she spoke the last words, the smile around her lips showed itself clearly, and the eyes beneath their heavy lids took on an intense light that went oddly with the smile.

‘Of course, I quite understand.’

Kin dropped her gaze, uncomfortable at the insincere ring of her own voice. She had already heard enough to justify the foreboding that Toshi had felt the other day.

She took a deep breath that might have been either a sign of assent or a sigh, then said:

‘I suppose that when a man reaches his position … that kind of thing becomes a necessity, doesn’t it?’

‘It does seem so. People come to expect it, you see.’

It was not true; with all her might, Tomo was checking the emotions that came welling up in her breast.

It was a year, perhaps, since her husband had first conceived the idea of taking a mistress into the house. The minor officials who danced attendance on Shirakawa had often bothered her with their innuendoes at saké parties and on other such occasions. ‘Mrs. Shirakawa,’ they would say, ‘with an establishment as big as this, you really ought to have more female help.’ Or, ‘The Chief Secretary has too much to do, you know. You should give him a little change now and then, he’ll sleep a lot more soundly.’

Her husband’s failure to reprimand his subordinates for their impertinence, despite his usual strong distaste for such familiarity, gave Tomo the impression that he was using them in order to make the suggestion himself.

Familiar by now with Shirakawa’s self-indulgence where women were concerned, Tomo could no longer feel for him the pure love she had experienced during the first few years of their marriage, yet his ability and his manly bearing still made him sufficiently attractive as a husband.

To take charge of a social life and household in keeping with her husband’s present position had not been easy for a woman born into a low-ranking samurai family of the former Hosokawa clan and married early with no chance, in the social turmoil just preceding the Meiji Restoration, to acquire either a proper education or the usual social accomplishments of the well-bred young woman. Yet an inborn hatred of compromise made her impose upon herself a strict rule of conduct that gave first importance in everything to husband and family, and she supervised the daily affairs of their household with a meticulous care that was beyond criticism. All the love and wisdom of which she was capable were devoted to the daily lives of her husband and the rest of the Shirakawa family.