There is nothing in all the world so lonely as a Japanese woman without husband or children. She has no claim on her own family, and little on her husband’s; and in a land where the children, once grown up, provide for their parents, what can a childless widowed old woman do? * * * * * The sun moved round the house, and O Matsu still sat in her kitchen rubbing softly at the copper bands of the saucepan. And death, in infinite pity, laid his hand upon her head, and his Shadow vanished. “_O meshi wa skoshi mo arimasen_,” she said. And the shaven old eyebrows puckered themselves together. “_Skoshi mo arimasen._” And the bent little figure went on rubbing. When the policeman came in the grey dawn of the morning, surprised that the _amado_ were not drawn, he found O Matsu, the polished copper bands of the _O hachi_ glittering in her lap--quite dead. VII KYOTO’S SOIRÉE Midnight and yet as hot as mid-day. Over our heads the velvet darkness lay as a visible lid above the streets, warm and still. Not a breath of air was stirring from one end of Kyoto to the other; the city seemed a vast dark house with all its windows shut. Only the rapid running of the _kurumaya_ produced the slightest breeze, and that was but the fanning of a heated ballroom; and when it stopped the hot still air settled down hotter, stiller, than before. We had reached the bank of the river, the bridge and Theatre Street lay beyond; and, as suddenly as one opens a door in a dark passage, we were there, inside, in the press and the noise, the lights and the crowd of Kyoto’s nightly _soirée_. Restaurants and hairpin stalls, _geisha_ booths and theatres, the interesting show of the two-headed fish, or the tragic story of the _Forty-seven Rōnin_, embroideries, and _bīru_, jugglers and phonographs, cheap stalls for the sale of shaved ice and sugar syrup, elegant restaurants with fish dinners; dancing-booths at two _sen_ a head, where white-painted _geisha_ girls continually sang four notes and assumed four postures, and sang the same four notes and repeated the same four postures to a tightly packed audience sitting on its heels, silent but appreciative; and all, restaurants, booths, theatres, stalls, blazed with lights and posters, deafened with the banging of big drums and the invitations of the proprietors, reeked with the smell of burning tallow, the fragrance of boiling tea, the scent of crushed geranium, the odour of an eastern summer’s night and of the press of clean-washed, hot humanity.