My wife’s attitude gradually began to affect my mood. After a while, my eyes stopped darting about as they had before. I even came to feel that my mind was properly settled in the place where I sat. In short, the fact that the wife, and the rest of the household from the start, paid no attention at all to my suspicious eyes and mistrustful manner must have given me great happiness. Because my nerves received no reflection cast back from others, they slowly grew calm.
Since the wife was a perceptive person, it may be that she deliberately treated me that way, or perhaps, as she openly claimed, she genuinely observed that I was broad-minded. My fretfulness may have been a phenomenon within my own head and not shown outward so much, so it is possible she was simply deceived by me.
As my mind grew calm, I gradually drew closer to the family. I came to exchange jests with both the wife and the young lady. There were days when I was called to the other room on the pretext that tea had been made. There were also evenings when I bought sweets and invited the two of them over here. I felt as though the sphere of my social intercourse had suddenly expanded. Because of this, my precious study hours were wasted any number of times. Strangely enough, that interference never bothered me in the least. The wife was, of course, a person of leisure. The young lady went to school and also took lessons in flower arrangement and koto, so one would think she must be busy, yet unexpectedly she seemed to have plenty of free time. And so the three of us, whenever we caught sight of one another, would gather together and pass the time in idle talk and play.
It was mostly the young lady who came to call for me. She would turn the corner of the veranda at a right angle and stand before my room, or pass through the sitting room and appear from behind the sliding door of the next room. The young lady would come there and pause a moment. Then she would surely call my name and ask, “Studying?” I generally had some difficult book open on the desk before me, staring at it, so to a bystander I must have looked every bit the diligent scholar. In truth, however, I was not studying the book so earnestly. Though my eyes rested on the page, I was more or less just waiting for the young lady to come call. When I waited and she did not come, I would helplessly rise myself. Then I would go before the other room and ask from my side, “Are you studying?”
The young lady’s room was a six-mat room adjoining the sitting room. The wife would sometimes be in the sitting room, and sometimes in the young lady’s room. In other words, though these two rooms had a partition, it was as if there were none, and the mother and daughter came and went, occupying both in a way that belonged to neither exclusively. When I called out from outside, it was always the wife who answered, “Do come in.” Even when the young lady was there, she rarely replied.
Occasionally the young lady, having some errand, would enter my room alone, and then, taking the chance, sit and talk at length—such instances began to appear in time. At such times, my heart would be strangely overrun with unease. And it was not merely that sitting face to face with a young woman made me uneasy. I would grow fidgety. An unnatural attitude, as if I were betraying myself, tormented me. The other party, however, was rather composed. She was so unabashed that one might doubt whether this was the same woman who could hardly utter a sound when taking koto lessons. When her mother called her from the sitting room because they had been talking too long, she would only answer “Yes,” and sometimes would not readily rise. And yet the young lady was by no means a child. My eyes saw this clearly. There were even plain traces of her behaving so as to make it clearly understood.
