“After the young mistress had gone out, I would heave a sigh of relief. And at the same time, I would be overcome by a feeling of something lacking, and yet of being somehow uneasy. Perhaps I was womanly. Seen from the perspective of you young people of today, I would no doubt seem all the more so. But most of us in those days were more or less that way.
The mistress rarely went out. Even on the rare occasions when she left the house, she never did so leaving only the young mistress and me behind, alone together. Whether that was by chance or by design, I could not tell. It may sound strange coming from my own mouth, but when I observed the mistress closely, it almost seemed as though she wished to bring her own daughter and me closer together. And yet, in certain instances, she also appeared to harbor a quiet wariness toward me; encountering such situations for the first time, I sometimes felt rather uncomfortable.
I wished the mistress would settle her attitude into one or the other. By any reasonable reckoning, it was plainly a contradiction. But with the memory of having been deceived by my uncle still fresh, I could not help but take one step further and suspect. I presumed that one side of the mistress’s attitude was genuine and the other false. And so I was lost in judgment. Not merely lost in judgment, but unable to grasp why she would do such a strange thing. Unable to divine the reason no matter how I tried, there were times I simply laid the blame on that single character ‘woman’ and endured it. After all, she is a woman, and that is why she is thus; women are fools, anyway. Whenever my thoughts reached an impasse, they always fell back to that.
And yet, though I thought so poorly of women, I could by no means think poorly of the young mistress. My reasoning would not move at all before her, as if it were of no use whatsoever. I held toward her a love almost akin to faith. You may find it odd that I apply a word I reserve for religion to a young woman, but I believe it firmly even now. I believe firmly that true love is not so different from religious devotion. Each time I looked upon the young mistress’s face, I felt as though I myself became beautiful. When I thought of her, a noble sentiment seemed to pass straight into me. If love, that mysterious thing, has two ends, and at its higher end dwells a sacred feeling while at its lower end moves carnal desire, then my love had surely seized that higher pole. I was of course a human body that could not part from flesh. But the eyes with which I beheld the young mistress, and the heart with which I thought of her, bore no scent of the flesh at all.
As I harbored resentment toward the mother and my love for the daughter deepened, the relationship of the three of us grew gradually more complex than at the start of my boarding there. For the most part, however, the change was almost entirely internal and did not show without. In the meantime, from a certain chance occurrence, it occurred to me that perhaps I had misunderstood the mistress all along. I came to reconsider that both sides of her contradictory attitude toward me might not be false. Moreover, I came to think that these were not alternate forces ruling her heart, but that both were always present in her breast at once. That is to say, I observed that even as the mistress tried as much as possible to bring the young mistress and me together, she simultaneously kept her guard on me—which seemed contradictory, yet when she kept her guard, she neither forgot nor reversed the other attitude, but still, as before, wished to bring us together. I interpreted it simply as her disliking the two becoming closer than what she deemed proper. As for me, who had never so much as felt the stirring to approach the young mistress from the flesh, I thought this an unnecessary worry. But from then on, I no longer thought ill of the mistress.
