The sliding door closed behind her. Karsten turned to Kent. "I might as well tell you now, of course. The woman was Jun-san." He turned abruptly to the papers, began gathering them. "These are nothing much, after all, Kent. Only notes of various kinds for a great Japanese drama that I thought I might construct. The Danes have a proverb that every sow thinks that her own pigs are the best. Probably I did the same." He carried the papers to the _todana_, put them out of sight. "We have had a melodramatic evening, haven't we, Kent-san, with your troubles and mine. It seems as if women must ever be the cause of our sorrows, yes, and our joys. _Shikataganai._ It can't be helped. Now let us have a drink and go to bed."
They had their drink. Karsten went to the adjoining room where he slept. Kent started downstairs to his room. At the head of the stairway he noticed something dark, bulky in the half-light, moving a little; his ear caught a sharp indrawn breath. It was Jun-san. A wave of intense pity swept over him. He wanted to say something to her, to comfort her, but what could he say. Undoubtedly she wished to be undisturbed by such crude, stupid consolation as he might contrive. He descended slowly and went to bed. But he could not sleep. He lay tossing, it seemed for hours. What, after all, did love of women, relations with women, ever bring but regret; swift, passionate, heart-swelling joy for the moment, even for days or years, but in the end weariness, sorrow, pangs of tragedy, irreparable, regretful remorse?
In the stillness of the night he could hear the shrill twitter of the cicadas in the garden, and faintly, softly, the sobbing, interminable, unconsolable, of Jun-san.
It was a dull season for news. From San Francisco they had cabled him to "hold down." A nation-wide strike in America and one of these futile European reparations conferences were filling the papers at home, leaving scant space for Oriental matters. Anyway, nothing was happening. His idleness irked him. Everything seemed to have slipped into a dull, wearisome routine. He rebelled at it--anything for a bit of excitement of some kind, any kind. The thought came to him, kept recurring insistently, that now was time to look about a little, to experiment with Karsten's advice. After all, why not? Was he not missing something, an interesting and pleasing phase of life in the Orient, one that they all unanimously described as delectable, from Pierre Loti on. Even the warning contained in the episode between Karsten and Jun-san was losing its significance. At home matters had slipped back into the old, daily routine, as if nothing had happened. Through the day she was always in the main house, watching with solicitous care to meet Karsten's wants, retiring only when he had retired, to her own house, the bower which Karsten had had built for her when their love was young. As he looked back at it, it seemed to him that probably the whole thing had been just a little melodramatic; they had been overwrought, excited. Karsten had always been super-sensitive, too nervously susceptible to his own emotions; the dramatic instinct, no doubt. And then Jun-san. Well, they were not all like her. These international adventures were often, generally indeed, colored by humor rather than by tragedy.