He was beginning to appreciate the force of the advice which had urged him to beware of Japan.  Here, in the hotbed of race prejudice, evil spirits were abroad.  It was so different in broad-hearted tolerant London.  Asako was charming and rich.  She was received everywhere.  To marry her was no more strange than to marry a French girl or a Russian.  They could have lived peaceably in Europe; and her distant fatherland would have added a pathetic charm to her personality.  But here in Japan, where between the handful of whites and the myriads of yellow men stretches a No Man’s Land, serrated and desolate, marked with bloody fights, with suspicions and treacheries, Asako’s position as the wife of a white man and Geoffrey’s position as the husband of a yellow wife were entirely different.  The stranger’s phrases had summed up the situation.  They were no good, these white men who had pawned their lives to yellow girls.  They were the failures, the rates.  Geoffrey had heard of promising young officers in India who had married native women and who had had to leave the service.  He had done the same.  Better go gay in the tea-houses with Wigram.  He was the husband of a coloured woman.

And then the crowd of half-caste brats?  In England one hardly ever thinks of the progeny of mixed races.  That bitter word “half-caste” is a distant echo of sensational novels.  Geoffrey had not as yet noticed the pale handsome children of Eurasia, Nature’s latest and most half-hearted experiment, whose seed, they say, is lost in the third generation.  But he had heard the tone of scorn which flung out the term; and it suddenly occurred to him that his own children would be half-castes.

He was walking on the garden terrace overlooking the starry city.  He was thinking with an intensity unfamiliar to him and terrifying, like a machine which is developing its fullest power, and is shaking a framework unused to such a strain.  He wanted a friend’s presence, a desultory chat with an old pal about people and things which they shared in common.  Thank God, Reggie Forsyth was in Tokyo.  He would leave to-morrow.  He must see Reggie, laugh at his queer clever talk again, relax himself, and feel sane.

He was nervous of meeting his wife, lest her instinct might guess his thoughts.  Yet he must not leave her any longer or his absence would make her anxious.  Not that his love for Asako had been damaged; but he felt that they were traveling along a narrow path over a bottomless gulf in an unexplored country.

He returned to the rooms and found her lying disconsolate on a sofa, wrapped in a flimsy champagne-coloured dressing-gown, one of the spoils of Paris.  Her hair had been rapidly combed out of its formal native arrangement.  It looked draggled and hard as though she had been bathing.  Titine, the French maid, was removing the rejected debris of kimono and sash.

“Sweetheart, you’ve been crying,” said Geoffrey, kissing her.