To please her daughter she opened up her house for hospitality with unseemly promptitude after her husband’s death.  The Smiths gave frequent dances, well-attended by young people of the Tokyo foreign community.  At the first of these series, Yae listened to the passionate pleadings of a young man called Hoskin, a clerk in an English firm.  On the second opportunity she became engaged to him.  On the third, she was struck with admiration and awe by a South American diplomat with the green ribbon of a Bolivian order tied across his false shirt front.  Don Quebrado d’Acunha was a practiced hand at seduction and Yae became one of his victims soon after her seventeenth birthday, and just ten days before her admirer sailed away to rejoin his legitimate spouse in Guayaquil.  The engagement with Hoskin still lingered on; but the young man, who adored her was haggard and pale.  Yae had a new follower, a teacher of English in a Japanese school, who recited beautifully and wrote poetry about her.

Then Baroness Miyazaki judged that her time was ripe.  She summoned young Hoskin into her dowager presence, and, with a manner heavily maternal, she warned him against the lightness of his fiancee.  When he refused to believe evil of her she produced a pathetic letter full of half-confessions, which the girl herself had written to her in a moment of expansion.  A week later the young man’s body was washed ashore near Yokohama.

Yae was sorry to hear of the accident; but she had long ceased to be interested in Hoskin, the reticence of whose passion had seemed like a touch of ice to her fevered nerves.  But this was Baroness Miyazaki’s opportunity to discredit Yae, to crush her rival out of serious competition, and to degrade her to the demi-monde.  It was done promptly and ruthlessly; for the Baroness’s gossip carried weight throughout the diplomatic, professional and missionary circles, even where her person was held in ridicule.  The facts of Hoskin’s suicide became known.  Nice women dropped Yae entirely; and bad men ran after her with redoubled zest.  Yae did not realize her ostracism.

The Smith’s dances next winter became so many competitions for the daughter’s corruption, and were rendered brilliant by the presence of several of the young officers attached to the British Embassy, who made the running, and finally monopolized the prize.

Next year the Smiths acquired a motor-car which soon became Yae’s special perquisite.  She would disappear for whole days and nights.  None of her family could restrain her.  Her answer to all remonstrances was: 

“You do what you want; I do what I want.”

That summer two English officers whom she especially favoured fought a duel with pistols—­for her beauty or for her honour.  The exact motive remained unknown.  One was seriously wounded; and both of them had to leave the country.