The Decay of the Angel - Yukio Mishima

Kinué.
“You look very good in it. Lovely. I know how much
you wanted to take me dancing in it. What a pity that I
should always be so ill. What a real pity. And that’s
why you’ve come to show me. How very kind of you.
That’s why I like you.”
It was obesity that had rendered Kinué immobile.
She was in the best of health and she got no exercise,
and in these six months she had fattened beyond
recognition. The heaviness and immobility gave more
immediacy to her illnesses. She was constantly taking
liver pills, and she would gaze from the chaise longue
through the trees at the blue sky, so soon to be lost.
Her perpetual refrain was that she was not long for
this world, and she was a great trial for the maids,
whom Tōru had told that they were in no
circumstances to laugh.
What Tōru admired was the cunning with which,
offered a set of conditions, she would outflank them
and raise defenses which would give her the
advantage and reinforce her beauty and perhaps add
a touch of the tragic to it. She had immediately
sensed that he did not mean to take her out. So she
had put her illness to the uses of the situation. Tōru
thought he had things to learn from this so stubbornly
guarded pride. She had become his teacher.