I don't know anything--and yet how could I be expected to know anything after the dull life I've had?
In my whole life I've never known a woman that could help me.

I've had to find out everything for myself--" With her gaze still on the mirror, she laid the brush on its back of pink celluloid--how much she had admired it when she bought it!--and leaned forward with her hands clasped on the cover of the dressing-table.

Her hair still flying out from the strokes of the brush surrounded her small eager face like a cloud.

From the open neck of her kimono, embroidered in a pattern of cranes and wistaria, the thin girlish lines of her throat rose with an appealing fragility, like the stem of some delicate flower.
"I wonder if Mother could have helped me if she had lived ?" she asked presently of her reflection.

"I wonder if she was different from all the other women I've known ?" Through her mind there passed swiftly a hundred memories of her childhood.