Geoffrey lit his cigar and made his way to the smoking-room.  Two elderly men, merchants from Kobe, were already sitting there over whiskies and sodas, discussing a mutual acquaintance.

“No, I don’t see much of him,” one of them, an American, was saying, “nobody does nowadays.  But take my word, when he came out here as a young man he was one of the smartest young fellows in the East.”

“Yes, I can quite believe you,” said the other, a stolid Englishman with a briar pipe, “he struck me as an exceptionally well-educated man.”

“He was more than that, I tell you.  He was a financial genius.  He was a man with a great future.”

“Poor fellow!” said the other.  “Well, he has only got himself to thank.”

Geoffrey was not an eavesdropper by nature, but he found himself getting interested in the fate of this anonymous failure, and wondered if he was going to hear the cause of the man’s downfall.

“When these Japanese women get hold of a man,” the American went on, “they seem to drain the brightness out of him.  Why, you have only got to stroll around to the Kobe Club and look at the faces.  You can tell the ones that have Japanese wives or housekeepers right away.  Something seems to have gone right out of their expression.”

“It’s worry,” said the Englishman.  “A fellow marries a Japanese girl, and he finds he has to keep all her lazy relatives as well; and then a crowd of half-caste brats come along, and he doesn’t know whether they are his own or not.”

“It is more than that,” was the emphatic answer.  “Men with white wives have worry enough; and a man can go gay in the tea-houses, and none the worse.  But when once they marry them it is like signing a bond with the devil.  That man’s damned.”

Geoffrey rose and left the room.  He thought on the whole it was better to withdraw than to hit that harsh-voiced Yankee hard in the eye.  He felt that his wife had been insulted.  But the speaker could not have known by whom he had been overheard.  He had merely expressed an opinion which, as a sudden instinct told Geoffrey, must be generally prevalent among the white people living in this yellow country.  Now that he came to think of it, he remembered curious glances cast at him and Asako by foreigners and also, strange to say, by Japanese, glances half contemptuous.  Had he acquired it already, that expression which marked the faces of the unfortunates at the Kobe Club?  He remembered also tactless remarks on board ship, such as, “Mrs. Barrington has lived all her life in England; of course, that makes all the difference.”

Geoffrey looked at his reflection in the long mirror in the hall.  There were no signs as yet of premature damnation on the honest, healthy British face.  There were signs, perhaps, of ripened thought and experience, of less superficial appreciation.  The eyes seemed to have withdrawn deeper into their sockets, like the figurines in toy barometers when they feel wet weather coming.