As the train from Tokyo carried Junzo to Kamakura, the young man, while watching the flying landscape from his window, thought with some natural curiosity of his bride to be. Her father and mother he had met. Upon two or three occasions he had seen her little brothers playing in the fields. His active imagination soon pictured Masago. She would, of course, be plump and rosy-cheeked like her mother, pretty perhaps, thought Junzo, but lacking in that grace and spirituality that to him was the ideal of true beauty.
When his own grandsires had been samurai in the service of the Lords of Echizen, this girl’s ancestors had tilled the soil. Still, times were changed. The samurai had fallen, and the tradesman and farmer had risen. Now the descendants of the samurai drew the jinrikisha containing the fat merchant, or policed the streets of big cities for the glory of still wearing a sword. Moreover, the elder Kamura was in sympathy with the modern spirit of the times, and had accepted favors from the hand of Yamada Kwacho. Besides, the latter had not been without honor in Echizen; and, after all, his own family—the once proud samurai family of Kamura—were now but simple citizens, nothing more.
“The Restoration was right and just,” said Junzo, and smoothed out the frown from his patrician face. “And after all,” he added to his thought, “this girl of the people will be a more fitting wife than a woman of modern fancies, such as have become the ladies of caste.”
Masago’s aspect pleased, surprised—nay, quite bewildered Junzo. When at the look-at meeting she had raised her head finally from its low obeisance, Junzo had been startled at its delicate beauty. It shocked him to see a flower so exquisitely lovely and delicate surrounded by relatives so completely plebeian.
During the entire visit Junzo found his eyes constantly straying toward his betrothed. When she moved about the room, and with her own hands served him tea, he noted with delight her grace of movement, and the symmetry of her figure.
When tea had been served and drunk, he found her close beside him. She had moved dutifully there at a signal from her father; and now, as his betrothed, she quietly filled the long-stemmed pipe for him, and lighted it at the hibachi. As he took it from her hands, their eyes met for the first time. Junzo, though thrilled by the glance of her eyes, felt curiously enough repulsed. There was something forbidding, almost menacing, in their glance. A moment later the long lashes were shielding them. Then the young man noted that she had not as much as changed color, but still was calmly white and unmoved. A feeling of uneasiness possessed him. His delight in her beauty was chilled.