As I looked I grew more and more conscious that the dress and the room were one, each the necessary complement of the other, the right frame for the right picture, and the right picture in the right frame. “The soul of Japan,” they say, “is the sword of the _samurai_.” “Then the soul of the _uchi_,” I thought, “is the _kimono_ of the housewife.” The simplicity of the straight-falling lines, the perfection of the embroidery on the innermost of the folds around the neck, the richness of the _obi_ at the waist, there was the same severity of design with richness of decoration which characterised the room, where two paper-paned walls, one of sliding wood and the fourth stained a subdued brown, enclosed the bare matted space. Against the one solid wall was built a slightly raised platform of polished black wood, forming with the two low pillars of wood a wide recess, the _tokonoma_. Within the _tokonoma_ hung a long silken scroll where pale storks flew across the moon, a _kakemono_ of price. On the black wood of the platform, which was raised but a few inches from the ground, were set the two swords of the _samurai_, a bronze horse of exquisite workmanship, and in the corner some long branches of white plum-blossom in a vase. In these four objects (as in the _obi_ and the embroidery of the neck-folds) lay the entire decoration of the room. And looking, one realised that great truth, almost unknown to us, but a truism in Japan--the artistic value of space. In a European drawing-room you often cannot see one ornament for its fellows: here the bronze horse and the _kakemono_ held the eyes; one looked, and one _saw_; their beauty filled the soul; next week, next month, they will go back to the store-house, and others will take their place. I could never forget the curved lines of those two swords against the polished black floor under the white fragrance of the plum-blossoms, any more than I could forget the soft half-moon curves of Miss Hayashi’s _kimono_, white below mauve, as she glided over the matted floor. Our lunch, we had come to lunch, opened with tea, pale amber tea in little round bowls on bronze stands, and sugar chrysanthemums, rice-paste storks and dolphins, cakes and sweets as perfect in design and colouring as though they were intended to last for ever. A rosy-cheeked maid, who bumped her head so vigorously on the floor that I thought she must get a headache, presented the tea, a bump for each guest and three as a salutation, while Miss Hayashi, folding squares of white paper in double triangles with one sweep of her hand, delicately heaped them full of sugar flowers and fishes, and passed them round, one to each of us.