But her loyal subjects who surround her—­it is impossible to place them.  They are poor, they are untidy, they are restless.  Their black hair is straggling, their brown eyes are soft, their clothes are desperately European, but ill-fitting and tired.  They chatter together ceaselessly and rapidly like starlings, with curious inflections in their English speech, and phrases snatched up from the vernacular.  They are forever glancing and whispering, bursting at times into wild peals of laughter which lack the authentic ring of gladness.  They are a people of shadows blown by the harsh winds of destiny across the face of a land where they can find no permanent resting place.  They are the children of Eurasia, the unhappiest people on earth.

It was among these people that Yae’s lot was cast.  She stepped into an immediate ascendancy over them, thanks to her beauty, her personality and, above all, to her money.  Baroness Miyazaki saw at once that she had a rival in Eurasia.  She hated her, but waited calmly for the opportunity to assist in her inevitable collapse, a woman of wide experience watching the antics of a girl innocent and giddy, the Baroness playing the part of Elizabeth of England to Yae’s Mary Queen of Scots.

Meanwhile, Yae was learning what the Eurasian girls were whispering about so continually—­love affairs, intrigues with secretaries of South American legations, secret engagements, disguised messages.

This seed fell upon soil well-prepared.  Her father had been a reprobate till the day of his death, when he had sent for his favourite Japanese girl to come and massage the pain out of his wasted body.  Her brothers had one staple topic of conversation which they did not hesitate to discuss before their sister—­geisha, assignation houses, and the licensed quarters.  Yae’s mind was formed to the idea that for grown-up people there is one absorbing distraction, which is to be found in the company of the opposite sex.

There was no talk in the Smith’s home of the romance of marriage, of the love of parents and children, which might have turned this precocious preoccupation in a healthy direction.  The talk was of women all the time, of women as instruments of pleasure.  Nor could Mrs. Smith, the Japanese mother, guide her daughter’s steps.  She was a creature of duty, dry-featured and self-effaced.  She did her utmost for her children’s physical wants, she nursed them devotedly in sickness, she attended to their clothes and to their comforts.  But she did not attempt to influence their moral ideas.  She had given up any hope of understanding her husband.  She schooled herself to accept everything without surprise.  Poor man!  He was a foreigner and had a fox (i.e. he was possessed); and unfortunately his children had inherited this incorrigible animal.