Once, with the aid of the girls of the hotel, she arrayed herself in the garments of a Japanese lady of position with her hair dressed in the shiny black helmet-shape, and her waist encased in the broad, tight obi or sash, which after all was no more uncomfortable than a corset.  Thus attired she came down to dinner one evening, trotting behind her husband as a well-trained Japanese wife should do.  In foreign dress she appeared petite and exotic, but one would have hesitated to name the land of her birth.  It was a shock to Geoffrey to see her again in her native costume.  In Europe, it had been a distinction, but here, in Japan, it was like a sudden fading into the landscape.  He had never realised quite how entirely his wife was one of these people.  The short stature and the shuffling gait, the tiny delicate hands, the grooved slit of the eyelids, and the oval of the face were pure Japanese.  The only incongruous elements were the white ivory skin which, however, is a beauty not unknown among home-reared Japanese women also, and, above all, the expression which looked out of the dancing eyes and the red mouth ripe for kisses, an expression of freedom, happiness, and natural high spirits, which is not to be seen in a land where the women are hardly free, never natural, and seldom happy.  The Japanese woman’s face develops a compressed look which leaves the features a mere mask, and acquires very often a furtive glance, as of a sharp-fanged animal half-tamed by fear, something weasel-like or vixenish.

Flaunting her native costume, Asako came down to dinner at the Miyako Hotel, laughing, chattering, and imitating the mincing steps of her country-women and their exaggerated politeness.  Geoffrey tried to play his part in the little comedy; but his good spirits were forced and gradually silence fell between them, the silence which falls on masqueraders in fancy dress, who have tried to play up to the spirit of their costume, but whose imagination flags.  Had Geoffrey been able to think a little more deeply he would have realized that this play-acting was a very visible sign of the gulf which yawned between his wife and the yellow women of Japan.  She was acting as a white woman might have done, certain of the impossibility of confusion.  But Geoffrey for the first time felt his wife’s exoticism, not from the romantic and charming side, but from the ugly, sinister, and—­horrible word—­inferior side of it.  Had he married a coloured woman?  Was he a squaw’s man?  A sickening vision of chonkina at Nagasaki rose before his imagination.

When dinner was over, and after Asako had received the congratulations of the other guests, she retired upstairs to put on her neglige.  Geoffrey liked a cigar after dinner, but Asako objected to the heavy aroma hanging about her bedroom.  They therefore parted generally for this brief half hour; and afterwards they would read and talk together in their sitting-room.  Like other people, they soon got into the habit of going to bed early in a country where there were no theatres playing in a comprehensible tongue, and no supper restaurants to turn night into day.