"And that's one more reason why I shall always hate capital and its men, and that's why I have made friends with those who feel like I do, the Socialists, the Communists and all those, the young men in Tokyo, the labor leaders, the anti-militarists. That's why I finally managed to get into Viscount Kikuchi's office, so I might learn all I could about what they are doing, the bureaucrats and the plutocrats--and, Hugh-san, that's the reason that I can't love you."
"But why, dear girl, why?" He gathered her into his arms. She did not resist, yet he sensed in her body a sort of stiffness, coldness; the flood tide of ecstatic emotion had passed. "But, Sadako-san, why should you waste your future, why place your back on happiness because your past has been wretched? Don't you care for me at all? Couldn't you love me just a little if you tried?"
She raised her head, smiled up to him wistfully. "Yes, I think I could love you, Hugh-san. But I'm not going to. I won't try. Can't you see how impossible it is. I'm unclean. I'm soiled. Do you think that I should want to come to you like that?"
He started to answer, but she placed a hand over his mouth. "Please, Hugh-san, don't talk. Just let us sit like this; yes, hold me, just a little while." She nestled close up to him, like a tired child, and he held her, wondering at the unexpected and strange perversities of women in matters of love, the impossibility of foreseeing or refuting the baffling obliquities of their reasoning. In old Japan such a mishap might have been looked upon with the merciful eye of tolerance; and in new Japan, the complaint of teachers in even the highest girl schools was that the maidens were babbling sophisticatedly of free love and the like. These young Japanese obtained their ideas from the oddest corners of Western modes of thought, from chance-bought or borrowed books, taking for gospel whatever they happened to absorb, be it from long antiquated volumes picked up in a Kanda second-hand bookshop or from the misconstrued conceptions of Western philosophy casually heard from these fanatic professors and students. But where could she have gotten this absurd idea that she was soiled, that her value, that wondrous gift of beauty and charm, had been vitiated, rendered utterly worthless, like that? At last he asked her, "Sadako-san, how did you get such a foolish idea like that? Of course, you're good, and sweet, and pure, and beautiful. You must never think of yourself as soiled, unclean; it's unhealthy, absurd. Of course, you don't believe such nonsense."