She was squatting on her white-gloved toes in native fashion.  Her kimono was sapphire blue, and it was fastened by a huge silver sash with a blue and green peacock embroidered on the fold of the bow, which looked like great wings and was almost as big as the rest of the little person put together.  Her back was turned to the guests; and she was gazing into the flames in an attitude of reverie.  She seemed unconscious of everything, as though still listening to the echo of the silent music.  Reggie in his haste to greet his visitors had not noticed the hurried solicitude to arrange the set of the kimono to a nicety in order to indicate exactly the right pose.

She looked like a jeweled butterfly on a great black leaf.

“Yae—­Miss Smith,” said Reggie, “these are my old friends whom I was telling you about.”

The small creature rose slowly with a dreamy grace, and stepped off her cushion as a fairy might alight from her walnut-shell carriage.

“I am very pleased to meet you,” she purred.

It was the stock American phrase which has crossed the Pacific westwards; but the citizen’s brusqueness was replaced by the condescension of a queen.

Her face was a delicate oval of the same creamy smoothness as Asako’s But the chin, which in Asako’s case receded a trifle in obedience to Japanese canons of beauty, was thrust vigorously forward; and the curved lips in their Cupid’s bow seemed moulded for kissing by generations of European passions, whereas about Japanese mouths there is always something sullen and pinched and colourless.  The bridge of her nose and her eyes of deep olive green, the eyes of a wildcat, gave the lie to her mother’s race.

Reggie’s artistry could not help watching the two women together with appreciative satisfaction.  Yae was even smaller and finer-fingered than the pure-bred Japanese.  Ever since he had first met Yae Smith he had compared and contrasted her in his mind with Asako Barrington.  He had used both as models for his dainty music.  His harmonies, he was wont to explain, came to him in woman’s shape.  To express Japan he must see a Japanese woman.  Not that he had any interest in Japanese women, physically.  They are too different from our women, he used to think; and the difference repelled and fascinated him.  It is so wide that it can only be crossed by frank sensuality or by blind imagination.  But the artist needs his flesh-and-blood interpreter if he is to get even as far as a misunderstanding.  So in figuring to himself the East, Reggie had at first made use of his memory of Asako, with her European education built up over the inheritance of Japan.  Later he met Yae Smith, through the paper walls of whose Japanese existence the instincts of her Scottish forefathers kept forcing their unruly way.

Geoffrey could not define his thoughts so precisely; but something unruly stirred in his consciousness, when he saw the ghost of his days of courtship rise before him in the deep blue kimono.  His wife had certainly made a great abdication when she abandoned her native dress for plain blue serges.  Of course he could not have Asako looking like a doll; but still—­had he fallen in love with a few yards of silk?