It was a feast, Mate—­the most picturesque, uneatable feast I ever sat on my doubly honorable feet to consume.  There were opal-eyed fish with shaded pink scales, served whole; soft brown eels split up the back and laid on a bed of green moss; soups, thin and thick; lotus root and mountain lily, and raw fish.  Each course—­and their name was many—­was served on a little two-inch-high lacquer table, with everything to match.  Sometimes it was gold lacquer, then again green, once red and another black.  But it was all a dream of color that shaded in with the little maids who served it; and they, swift, noiseless and pretty, were trained to graceful perfection.  The few furnishings of the room were priceless.  Uncle sat by in his silken robes, gracious and courteous, surprising me with his knowledge of current events.  In the guise of host, he is charming.  That is, if only he would not always talk with dropped eyelids, giving the impression that he is half dreaming and is only partly conscious of the world and its follies.  And all the time I know perfectly well that he sees everything around him and clean on to the city limits.

Again and again in his talks he referred to his color prints and the years of patience required to collect them.  Right then, Mate, I made a vow to study the pesky things as they have seldom been attacked before—­even though I never had much use for pictures in which you cannot tell the top side from the bottom, without a label.  But then, Jack says, my artistic temperament will never keep me awake at night.  Now I decided all at once to make a collection.  Heaven knows what I will do with it.  But Uncle grew so enthusiastic he included his niece in the conversation, and while his humor was at high tide I coaxed him into a promise that Sada might come down to Hiroshima very soon, and help me look for prints.

Yes, indeed there was a dance afterwards, and everything was deadly, hysterically solemn—­so rigidly proper, so stiffly conventional that it palled.  It was the most maleless house of revelry I ever saw.  Why, even the kakemono were pictures of perfect ladies and the gate-man was a withered old woman.

There was absolutely nothing wrong I could name.  It was all exquisitely, daintily, lawfully Japanese.  But I sat by my window till early morning.  There was a very ghost of a summer moon.  Out of the night came the velvety tones of a mighty bell; the sing-song prayers of many priests; the rippling laugh of a little child and the tinkling of a samisen.  Every sound made for simple joy and peace.  But I thought of the girl somewhere beyond the twinkling street lights, who, with mixed races in her blood and a strange religion in her heart, had dreamed dreams of this as a perfect land, and was now paying the price of disillusionment with bitter tears.

Eight o ’clock the next morning.

I cabled Jack, “Hiroshima for winter.”

He answered, “Thank the Lord you are nailed down at last.”