“And is this your oriental version of Veronique?” asked his friend.

“No,” said Reggie, “it is a different chapter of experience altogether.  Perhaps old Hardwick was right.  I still have much to learn, thank God.  Veronique was personal; Yae is symbolic.  She is my model, just like a painter’s model, only more platonic.  She is the East to me; for I cannot understand the East pure and undiluted.  She is a country-woman of mine on her father’s side, and therefore easier to understand.  Impersonality and fatalism, the Eastern Proteus, in the grip of self-insistence and idealism, the British Hercules.  A butterfly body with this cosmic war shaking it incessantly.  Poor child! no wonder she seems always tired.”

“She is a half-caste?” asked Geoffrey.

“Bad word, bad word.  She isn’t half-anything; and caste suggests India and suttees.  She is a Eurasian, a denizen of a dream country which has a melodious name and no geographical existence.  Have you ever heard anybody ask where Eurasia was?  I have.  A traveling Member of Parliament’s wife at the Embassy here only a few months ago.  I said that it was a large undiscovered country lying between the Equator and Tierra del Fuego.  She seemed quite satisfied, and wondered whether it was very hot there; she remembered having heard a missionary once complain that the Eurasians wore so very few clothes!  But to return to Yae, you must meet her.  This evening?  No?  To-morrow then.  You will like her because, she looks something like Asako; and she will adore you because you are utterly unlike me.  She comes here to inspire me once or twice a week.  She says she likes me because everything in my house smells so sweet.  That is the beginning of love, I sometimes think.  Love enters the soul through the nostrils.  If you doubt me, observe the animals.  But foreign houses in Japan are haunted by a smell of dust and mildew.  You cannot love in them.  She likes to lie on my sofa, and smoke cigarettes, and do nothing, and listen to my playing tunes about her.”

“You are very impressionable,” said his friend.  “If it were anybody else I should say you were in love with this girl.”

“I am still the same, Geoffrey; always in love—­and never.”

“But what about the other people here?” Barrington asked.

“There are none, none who count.  I am not impressionable.  I am just short-sighted.  I have to focus my weak vision on one person and neglect the rest.”

* * * * *

A rickshaw was waiting to take Geoffrey back to the hotel.  Under the saffron light of an uncanny sunset, which barred the western heavens with three broad streaks of orange and inky-blue like a gypsy girl’s kerchief, the odd little vehicle rolled down the hill of Miyakezaka which overhangs the moat of the Imperial Palace.

The latent soul of Tokyo, the mystery of Japan, lies within the confines of that moat, which is the only great majestic thing in an untidy rambling village of more than two million living beings.