A Japanese girl’s feet are a sweet little piece. Their flatness and archlessness manifest their pathetic womanliness. Feet tell as much as palms. I have taken the same laborious care with my feet as with my hands. Now they have to retire into the heavy constrained shoes of America. It’s not so bad, however, to slip one’s feet into gorgeous silk like that. My shoes are of superior shape. They have a small high heel. I’m glad they make me much taller. A bamboo I set some three Summers ago cast its unusually melancholy shadow on the round paper window of my room, and whispered, “Sara! Sara! Sara!” It sounded to me like a pallid voice of sayonara. (By the way, the profuse tips of my bamboo are like the ostrich plumes of my new American hat.) “Sayonara” never sounded before more sad, more thrilling. My good-bye to “home sweet home” amid the camellias and white chrysanthemums is within ten days. The steamer “Belgic” leaves Yokohama on the sixth of next month. My beloved uncle is chaperon during my American journey. 27th—I scissored out the pictures from the ’Merican magazines. (The magazines were all tired-looking back numbers. New ones are serviceable in their own home. Forgotten old actors stray into the villages for an inglorious tour. So it is with the magazines. Only the useless numbers come to Japan, I presume.) The pictures—Meriken is a country of woman; that’s why, I fancy, the pictures are chiefly of woman—showed me how to pick up the long skirt. That one act is the whole “business” of looking charming on the street. I apprehend that the grace of American ladies is in the serpentine curves of the figure, in the narrow waist. Woman is the slave of beauty. I applied my new corset to my body. I pulled it so hard. It pained me. 28th—My heart was a lark. I sang, but not in a trembling voice like a lark, some slices of school song. I skipped around my garden. Because it occurred to me finally that I’ll appear beautiful in my new costume. I smiled happily to the sunlight whose autumnal yellow flakes—how yellow they were!—fell upon my arm stretched to pluck a chrysanthemum. I admit that my arm is brown. But it’s shapely. 29th—English of America—sir, it is light, unreserved and accessible—grew dear again. My love of it returned like the glow in a brazier that I had watched passionately, then left all the Summer days, and to which I turned my apologetic face with Winter’s approaching steps. Oya, oya, my book of Longfellow under the heavy coat of dust! I dusted the book with care and veneration as I did a wee image of the Lord a month ago.