Yet even when this one and that cried out to him how fine he was and how fine his robe, he took no full sweet pleasure in himself as he might have done. She had said no word to him. No, when he had lingered at the door an instant she went on with her task, bending to the short-handled broom and sweeping about the house and never looking up to ask if the robe fitted him or if his body was suited to its shape, as she was wont to do if she had made him even so much as a pair of new shoes. At last he had even said, half shy, “It seems to me you have sewed this robe better than any robe I ever had, and it fits me as a townsman’s does.” But still she would not look up. She set the broom in its corner and went and fetched a roll of cotton wool and set herself to spinning it to thread, since she had used her store in the making of the blue robe. At last she answered bitterly, “At the cost it was to me it should look like an emperor’s robe.” But she would not look at him, no, not even when he flung himself down the street. She would not even look at him secretly when his back was turned because she was so bitter against him, although her heart knew the blue robe suited him well. V Through that day long the mother watched for the man to come home. It was a day when the fields could be left to their own growing, for the rice was planted in its pools, and in the shallow water and in the warm sunlight the green young plants waved their newly forming heads in the slight winds. There was no need to go out to the land that day. So the mother sat under the willow tree spinning and the old woman came to sit beside her, glad of one to listen to what she said, and while she talked she unfastened her coat and stretched her thin old withered arms in the hot sun and felt the good heat in her bones, and the children ran naked in the sunshine too. But the mother sat silently on, twisting the spindle with a sure movement between her thumb and the finger she wet on her tongue, and the thread came out close spun and white, and when she had made a length of it she wound it about a bit of bamboo polished smooth to make a spool. She spun as she did all things, firmly and well, and the thread was strong and hard. Slowly the sun climbed to noon and she put her spinning down and rose. “He will be coming home soon and hungry for all his blue robe,” she said dryly, and the old woman answered, cackling with her ready, feeble laughter, “Oh, aye, what is on a man’s belly is not the same as what is in it--”