At first Miya could get out nothing between her sobs but ‘Oh what a fool I was … I can’t stand it … I can’t stay with him any longer,’ but as the storm of emotion passed she began, albeit incoherently, to complain of Michimasa’s heartless behavior. As Tomo had suspected, she had found him somehow unsympathetic from the start, but her illness this summer had shown her still more clearly the callousness of his nature. Far from worrying himself over her physical debility he sought to have physical relations with her almost every night. She had given in, since to object only made him more insistent, but in the last few days she had been menstruating. At such times she normally refused him, but this time nothing would make him take no for an answer. The previous night she had finally refused him absolutely, but in the morning he had been terrifyingly out of temper, had told her among other things that a wife who disobeyed her husband’s commands was punishable by law, and had thrown at her everything he could lay his hands on. If she stayed married to such a man, she would surely end up by getting killed, she said, so she was going back to her parents’ home that very day. Even allowing for a certain hysterical exaggeration, a man like Michimasa was quite capable of the things she described, and Tomo listened with complete sympathy; yet even so she did her utmost to persuade Miya not to leave the house into which she had married, insisting that they would speak to Michimasa and see that he never committed such outrages again.

The Miya that Tomo had pictured to herself was a gentle woman ruled by her affections, but today she was a different person altogether. Her face was blank, hard, and drained of all color, and the almond eyes that normally smiled so tenderly were narrowed at the outer corners and expressionless. Tomo tried to arouse in her a kind of fellow-feeling by talking of her own feelings as a woman in the face of the indignities she must constantly suffer from Yukitomo, but Miya seemed deaf and indifferent to such difficult, depressing talk and only dwelt more and more insistently on her own unhappy married life, as though it were all Tomo’s own responsibility. Sensing that the more she talked the more Miya saw her as a country woman wrapped up in the past, Tomo was overcome by a profound disappointment. As it was gradually borne in on her that despite appearances Miya was not the essentially warm-hearted woman who brought a little grace to other people’s lives that she had imagined, she felt an increasing irritation at her own lack of insight.