“When I returned from England,” said Count Saito, “I tried to live again in the Japanese style.  But we could not, neither my wife nor I. We took cold and rheumatism sleeping on the floor, and the food made us ill; so we had to give it up.  But I was sorry.  For I think it is better for a country to keep its own ways.  There is a danger nowadays, when all the world is becoming cosmopolitan.  A kind of international type is springing up.  His language is esperanto, his writing is shorthand, he has no country, he fights for whoever will pay him most, like the Swiss of the Middle Ages.  He is the mercenary of commerce, the ideal commercial traveler.  I am much afraid of him, because I am a Japanese and not a world citizen.  I want my country to be great and respected.  Above all, I want it to be always Japanese.  I think that loss in national character means loss of national strength.”

Asako was being introduced by her hostess to the celebrated collection of dwarf trees, which had made the social fame of the Count’s sojourn as Ambassador in Grosvenor Square.

Countess Saito, like her husband, spoke excellent English; and her manner in greeting Asako was of London rather than of Tokyo.  She took both her hands and shook them warmly.

“My dear,” she said, in her curious deep hoarse voice, “I’m so glad to see you.  You are like a little bit of London come to say that you have not forgotten me.”

This great Japanese lady was small and very plain.  Her high forehead was deeply lined and her face was marked with small-pox.  Her big mouth opened wide as she talked, like a nestling’s.  But she was immensely rich.  The only child of one of the richest bankers of Japan, she had brought to her husband the opportunity for his great gifts as a political leader, and the luxury in which they lived.

The little trees were in evidence everywhere, decorating the living rooms, posted like sentinels on the terrace, and staged with the honour due to statuary at points of vantage in the garden.  But their chief home was in a sunny corner at the back of a shrubbery, where they were aligned on shelves in the sunlight.  Three special gardeners who attended to their wants were grooming and massaging them, soothing and titivating them, for their temporary appearances in public.  Here they had a green-house of their own, kept slightly warmed for a few delicate specimens, and also for the convalescence of the hardier trees; for these precious dwarfs are quite human in their ailments, their pleasures and their idiosyncracies.

Countess Saito had a hundred or more of these fashionable pets, of all varieties and shapes.  There were giants of primeval forests reduced to the dimensions of a few feet, like the timbers of a lordly park seen through the wrong end of a telescope.  There were graceful maple trees, whose tiny star-like leaves were particularly adapted to the process of diminution which had checked the growth of trunk and branches.