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Plum Blossom wore a corset outside her kimono. Some one had told her that this was the most important article of a barbarian woman’s wardrobe, and the tighter it was the better. So the little Japanese girl had tied herself by the corset-string to a post. By dint of hard pulling she had managed to encase her plump form so tightly that she could scarcely breathe. Iris, with hands clad in large kid gloves, was drawing on a pair of number five shoes. Her feet were those of the average American child of seven or eight years. At this juncture Miss Summer (who being engaged to Gozo was always called “Miss” by the little girls) opened the shoji and thrust a flushed and excited face between the partitions. She was six months older than when she had wailed aloud her determination not to wash the feet of a barbarian mother-in-law, but she seemed as childish and silly as ever as she came tittering into the room, an enormous straw hat, from which dangled ribbons and bedraggled ostrich-feathers, upon her head. The sisters gasped in admiration, their eyes purple with envy and wonder. Only in pictures had they seen anything so gorgeous as that hat.