Miss Chie and her hero walked through the silent and snow-covered streets, which became louder and more marked by boot prints the closer they got to their destinations. The poor girl was frightfully shy – her name was Yuki, apparently, which was all the information Chie could get out of her before she deflected into small talk. They agreed that yes, the cold was terrible, but at least the snow was pretty. She wouldn’t stop calling Chie ‘Miss Nishimura’, despite Chie’s insistence that, since they were about the same age and she owed Yuki a great favour, more familiar modes of address were appropriate. Chie had never been one for sticking to the strict formalities around names, a habit she’d probably picked up from her foreign cousins. Besides, she didn’t even know Yuki’s family name – she seemed reluctant to make even this small reference to her family – so it felt fair to stick to first names. In the end, they reached the neutral ground of ‘Miss Chie’.

When they ran out of weather phenomena to discuss and honorifics to argue over, Chie began to ramble about the books she’d read lately. Mr Shaw’s Pygmalion had been a riot, and she hoped to see it performed someday – although there was the difficulty of translating all the jokes. A book could have footnotes to explain each reference, but that didn’t translate to the stage well. She was lucky to be able to read the French editions, which tended to be easier to find than Japanese translations, although there were parts she didn’t get and had to ask her grandmother about. And there were the serial chapters her mother had stapled together years ago for her personal collection and later passed down - M. Leroux’s delightful Phantom of the Opera. Her father disapproved of such frivolous things as romance novels, but thankfully his French was too poor to understand much beyond the titles. She could easily get away with lying about the contents. If books were food, Chie was like a dog that eats too fast and makes itself sick.

In many ways, the pages were far more her friends then the girls her age she had tea with each month. She almost felt bad about that – they were good company and had been her loyal companions through her school days – and reminded herself often to be thankful. And thankful she was – but she couldn’t help but feel that propriety had smothered the fire of their friendship. They could speak vaguely about love or boys, but she could feel the constant weight of all the words they all left unsaid. There was a part of her that yearned to be like Christine or Guinevere or Cathy – to be the sort of woman worth breaking rules for. As she poured her deepest secrets and daydreams out to Yuki – things a young lady ought not to dream about, let alone speak aloud – something within her ached. She wasn’t sure what made her trust a stranger so deeply.

Yuki looked at her in a way that Chie wasn’t used to. Maybe it was understanding. It felt strange that they had just met. As the greeting cards say, strangers are just friends you don’t know yet.