you're not in the way at all. Please come in." He seemed rattled. I took the cushion from under me and turned it over before handing it to Horiki, but snatching it from my hands, he turned it over once more as he offered it to the woman. There was only that one cushion for guests, besides the cushion Horiki sat on. The woman was a tall, thin person. She declined the cushion and sat demurely in a corner by the door. I listened absent-mindedly to their conversation. The woman, evidently an employee of a magazine publisher, had commissioned an illustration from Horiki, and had come now to collect it. "We're in a terrible hurry," she explained. "It's ready. It's been ready for some time. Here you are." A messenger arrived with a telegram. As Horiki read it I could see the good spirits on his face turn ugly. "Damn it, what have you been up to?" The telegram was from Flatfish. "You go back at once. I ought to take you there myself, I suppose, but I haven't got the time now. Imagine—a runaway, and looking so smug!" The woman asked, "Where do you live?" "In Okubo," I answered without thinking. "That's quite near my office." She was born in Koshu and was twenty-eight. She lived in an apartment in Koenji with her five-year-old girl. She told me that her husband had died three years before. "You look like someone who's had an unhappy childhood. You're so sensitive—more's the pity for you."
I led for the first time the life of a kept man. After Shizuko (that was the name of the lady journalist) went out to work in the morning at the magazine publisher's, her daughter Shigeko and I obediently looked
