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something that rich people did. “That’s too bad.”
    “But you can come visit me,” she suggested. “If you like. We could play when nobody will interrupt us. Out in the garden, too.”
    Hiroshi nodded. “Yes, okay.”
    “Tomorrow afternoon maybe? Three o’clock?”
    “Okay,” said Hiroshi.

    Charlotte told herself that evening that all in all it had been a good day. Even the reception was fun, she decided. Not the getting ready, of course. All those interminable hours of washing, drying, and styling her hair and trying on clothes really got on her nerves. But the reception itself was always fantastic; everybody was dressed in their best, making pleasant conversation, and she got to sit at a beautifully decorated table and eat wonderful things.
    The guests were always charmed when they saw a ten-year-old girl behaving like a fine lady. Charlotte always gave a little secret smile when she heard them say that. As if it were so difficult. All you had to do was behave nicely and say “Please” and “Thank you” and “Really? How interesting” a lot, know which cutlery to use when (which was easy—it always went from outside to inside), and not spill anything; that was all there was to it. Oh, and of course you had to stay sitting still for as long as the grown-ups did. Actually, that was the hardest part.
    Charlotte was particularly well behaved that evening, since she knew it would make her mother happy. And she wanted her mother to be happy, since she was happy as well, happy to have made a friend thanks to Maman; if she hadn’t invited Hiroshi and his mother, it would never have happened. She was sitting next to a dear old Japanese gentleman, who was delighted he could speak to her in Japanese. It turned out he was the minister of education for the entire country. Charlotte told him she would much rather go to a real school and have classmates than take private lessons, but that unfortunately she had no choice.
    On the other side of her sat a young Russian lady who looked, Charlotte realized with a jolt, astonishingly like the doll that was now called Valérie. However, her name wasn’t Valérie but Oksana, and she didn’t speak Japanese, just English, and even that not particularly well. Charlotte asked her to teach her a few words and phrases in Russian and then decided she liked the language.
    “Perhaps my papa will be transferred to Russia one day. Then I’ll learn Russian,” Charlotte said.
    Oksana smiled. “I’m sure you’ll find it easy.” The minister of education nodded vigorously in agreement.
    After dinner they retired to the Yellow Salon, where the men gathered on one side of the room, smoking and drinking whiskey or pastis. The women took over the other half, where the seats were, and drank liqueurs and chatted.
    Charlotte didn’t have to go to bed yet; that was part of the arrangement. If she behaved like a fine lady, she was allowed to stay up as long as she liked on evenings like this. She’d had lots of practice staying up late by now. The only thing that bothered her was they expected her to stay over on the ladies’ side of the salon. But she was interested in what the men had to say much more so than in the ladies’ conversation. The ladies mostly liked to talk about “social trends.” Charlotte didn’t know what they were; they seemed to be of great concern. Or they chatted about painters and their sensational exhibitions and that sort of thing. That evening they were talking about an American writer called Michael Crichton and his latest novel, which apparently said bad things about Japan. Everybody agreed it was not nice to write novels like that. What Charlotte couldn’t understand was why they had to go on and on about it.
    She wandered over to the bar that had been set up in the middle of the salon and took another soda. She had noticed that if you drank a lot of soda, it was easier to stay up late. Papa was standing near the bar with the Russian ambassador, who was