Now companionship is the last thing to be looked for in a far-eastern couple.

Where custom requires a wife to follow dutifully in the wake of her husband, whenever the two go out together, there is small opportunity for intercourse by the way, even were there the slightest inclination to it, which there is not.
The appearance of the pair on an excursion is a walking satire on sociability, for the comicality of the connection is quite unperceived by the performers.

In the privacy of the domestic circle the separation, if less humorous, is no less complete.

Each lives in a world of his own, largely separate in fact in China and Korea, and none the less in fancy in Japan.

On the continent a friend of the husband would see little or nothing of the wife, and even in Japan he would meet her much as we meet an upper servant in a friend's house.