She seemed to read his thought. "I came to you, Kent-san, because I could go to no Japanese. They would have been shocked, would have sent me home. And I wanted to talk to some one, to get away from the family where I was. I knew that the go-between would be coming in a few days, and I wanted to get advice first. I didn't know what to do.
"But why don't you want to marry Kikuchi-san? Don't you like him?" he was sparring, trying to elicit from her something that might give a clew.
"Yes, I like him, but I would never marry a Japanese like him, to be just like these other old-fashioned Japanese married women, always obedient, always compelled to serve him, to have to regard whatever he might do as right, even if he had geisha sweethearts; never to have a right to have a personality of my own."
"But surely Kikuchi-san is modern. I know him. Sometimes I think he's almost radical. He takes after foreign ideas in everything. It seems to me----"
"Oh, yes, of course, he's modern. He goes to the dances, and dresses after the _haikara_ fashions, and plays golf, and talks very advanced politics, and all that. And in all that he is really modern, advanced, like so many of our young men; but when it comes to marriage, to the matter of the standing of women, he's like the rest of them, too. They want modernism and liberalism, but only for the men. In regard to us women their view is different; there they want to stick entirely to the old, hidebound rules. They want the modern freedom of thought and of action--but only for the men.
"But we women, we want the right to think too, to live our own lives just as your women do. We are no more stupid, no more old-fashioned than the men. But they are all against us, all the men. See how often the _Fujin Koraon_, the Public Opinion of Women paper, is suppressed by the police. But still we learn and we know. Women are going into business and into politics; there are even many women Socialists, and the police are afraid of them. And in the matter of marriage; we want now to have a right to say whom we want to marry, to have a right to marry--for love." She looked him straight in the eye, compelling her glance to meet his, blushing a little, but only finger tips rubbing restlessly against one another betraying her nervousness. "Even in school we talked about love, yes, even free love. It is right if people love each other, if there's no other way. _Shikataganai._ It can't be helped then. And the principal called in Shinto priests, and had them perform, right in the school, the 'soul-quieting ceremony,' and eighteen of us had to assist them, all dressed in white. And we laughed at it all. It was so silly.