The colours are bright, but The petals fall! In this world of ours who Shall remain forever? To-day crossing The high mountains of mutability, We shall see no fleeting dreams, Being inebriate no longer.
"_O hay[=o] gazaimas!_" (Respectfully early!)
Twitterings of maid-servants salute the lady of the house with the conventional morning greeting. Mrs. Fujinami Shidzuyé replies in the high, fluty, unnatural voice which is considered refined in her social set.
The servants glide into the room which she has just left, moving noiselessly so as not to wake the master who is still sleeping. They remove from his side the thick warm mattresses upon which his wife has been lying, the hard wooden pillow like the block of history, the white sheets and the heavy padded coverlet with sleeves like an enormous kimono. They roil up all these _yagu_ (night implements), fold them and put them away into an unsuspected cupboard in the architecture of the veranda.
After a while his wife returns. She is dressed for the morning in a plain grey silk kimono with a broad olive-green _obi_ (sash). Her hair is arranged in a formidable helmet-like _coiffure_--all Japanese matrons with their hair done properly bear a remote resemblance to Pallas Athene and Britannia. This will need the attention of the hairdresser so as to wax into obedience a few hairs left wayward by the night in spite of that severe wooden pillow, whose hard, high discomfort was invented by female vanity to preserve from disarray the rigid order of their locks. Her feet are encased in little white _tabi_ like gloves, for the big toe has a compartment all to itself. She walks with her toes turned in, and with the heels hardly touching the ground. This movement produces a bend of the knees and hips so as to maintain the equilibrium of the body, and a sinuous appearance which is considered the height of elegance in Japan, so that the grace of a beautiful woman is likened to "a willow-tree blown by the wind," and the shuffle of her feet on the floor-matting to the wind's whisper.
Mrs. Fujinami carries a red lacquer tray. On the tray is a tiny teapot and a tiny cup and a tiny dish, in which are three little salted damsons, with a toothpick fixed in one of them. It is the _petit déjeuner_ of her lord. She put down the tray beside the head of the pillow, and makes a low obeisance, touching the floor with her forehead.