At first Geoffrey was bored.  He did not know many of the dancers, business people from Yokohama, most of them, or strangers stopping at the hotel.  Their appearance depressed him.  The women had hard faces, the lustre was gone from their hair, they wore ill-fitting dresses without style or charm.  The men were gross, heavy-limbed and plethoric.  The music was appalling.  It was produced out of a piano, a cello, and a violin driven by three Japanese who cared nothing for time or tune.  Each dance, evidently, was timed to last ten minutes.  At the end of the ten minutes the music stopped without finishing the phrase or even the bar; and the movement of the dancers was jerked into stability.

Reggie entered the room with Yae Smith.  His manner was unusually excited and elate.

“Hello, Geoffrey, enjoying yourself?”

“No,” said Geoffrey, “my wife has got a headache; and that music is simply awful.”

“Come and have a drink,” proposed Reggie.

He took them aside into the bar and ordered champagne.

“This is to drink our own healths,” he announced, “and many years of happiness to all of us.  It is also, Geoffrey, to drive away your English spleen, and to make you into an agreeable grass-widower into whose hands I may commend this young lady, because you can dance and I cannot.  My evening is complete.  This is my Nunc Dimittis.”

He led them back to the ballroom.  Then, with a low bow and a flourish of an imaginary cocked-hat, he disappeared.

Geoffrey and Yae danced together.  Then they sat out a dance; and then they danced again.  Yae was tiny, but she danced well; and Geoffrey was used to a small partner.  For Yae it was sheer delight to feel the size and strength of this giant man bending over her like a sheltering tree; and then to be lifted almost in his arms and to float on tiptoe over the floor with the delightful airiness of dreams.

What strange orgies our dances are!  To the critical mind what a strange contradiction to our sheepish passion-hiding conventions!  A survival of the corroboree, of the immolation of the tribal virgins, a ritual handed down from darkest antiquity like the cult of the Christmas Tree and the Easter Egg; only their significance is lost, while that of the dance is transparently evident.

Maidens as chaste as Artemis, wives as loyal as Lucretia pass into the arms of men who are scarcely known to them with touchings of hands and legs, with crossings of breath, to the sound of music aphrodisiac or fescennine.

The Japanese consider, not unreasonably, that our dancing is disgusting.

A nice girl no doubt, and a nice man too, thinks of a dance as a graceful exercise or as a game like tennis or hockey.  But Yae was not a nice girl; and when the music stopped with its hideous abruptness, it awoke her from a kind of trance in which she had been lost to all sensations except the grip of Geoffrey’s hand and arm, the stooping of his shadow above her, and the tingling of her own desire.