* * * * *

Then he heard the story of the duel fought for Yae Smith by two young English officers, both of them her lovers, so people said, and the vaguer tale of a fiance’s suicide.  Some weeks later, he met her for the first time at a dance.  She was the only woman present in Japanese dress, and Reggie thought at once of Asako Barrington.  How wise of these small women to wear the kimono which drapes so gracefully their stumpy figures.  He danced with her, his right hand lodged somewhere in the folds of the huge bow with the embroidered peacock, which covered her back.  Under this stiff brocade he could feel no sensation of a living body.  She seemed to have no bones in her, and she was as light as a feather.  It was then that he imagined her as Lilith, the snake-girl.  She danced with ease, so much better than he, that at the end of a series of cannons she suggested that they might sit out the dance.  She guided him into the garden, and they took possession of a rustic seat.  In the ballroom she had seemed timid, and had spoken in undertones only; but in this shadowy tete-a-tete beneath the stars, she began to talk frankly about her own life.

She told him about her one visit to England with her father; how she had loved the country, and how dull it was for her here in Japan.  She asked him about his music.  She would so like to hear him play.  There was an old piano at her home.  She did not think he would like it very much—­indeed, Reggie was already shuddering in anticipation—­or else?  Would she come to tea with him at the Embassy?  That would be nice!  She could bring her mother or one of her brothers?  She would rather come with a girl friend.  Very well, to-morrow?

On the morrow she came.

Reggie hated playing in public.  He said that it was like stripping naked before a multitude, or like having to read one’s own love letters aloud in a divorce court.  But there is nothing more soothing than to play to one attentive listener, especially if that listener be feminine and if the interest shown be that personal interest, which with so many women takes the place of true appreciation, and which looks over the art to the artist.

Yae came with the girl friend, a lean and skinny half-caste girl like a gipsy, whom Yae patronized.  She came once again with the girl friend; and then she came alone.

Reggie was relieved, and said so.  Yae laughed and replied: 

“But I brought her for your own sake; I always go everywhere by myself.”

“Then please don’t take me into consideration ever again,” answered Reggie.

So those afternoons began which so soon darkened into evenings, while Reggie sat at the piano playing his thoughts aloud, and the girl lay on the sofa or squatted on the big cushion by the fire, with cigarettes within reach and a glass of liqueur, wrapped in an atmosphere of laziness and well-being such as she had never known before.  Then Reggie would stop playing.  He would sit down beside her, or he would take her on his knee; and they would talk.