The dust and sun of the motor ride, the constant anxiety lest they might run over some doddering old woman or some heedless child, had given her a headache. As soon as Geoffrey returned from his dip, she announced that she would go back to her room. As the headache continued, she abandoned the idea of dancing. She would go to bed, and listen to the music in the distance. Geoffrey wished to stay with her, but she would not hear of it. She knew that her husband was fond of dancing; she thought that the change and the brightness would be good for him. "Don't flirt with Yaé Smith," she smiled, as he gave her the last kiss, "or Reggie will be jealous." At first Geoffrey was bored. He did not know many of the dancers, business people from Yokohama, most of them, or strangers stopping at the hotel. Their appearance depressed him. The women had hard faces, the lustre was gone from their hair, they wore ill-fitting dresses without style or charm. The men were gross, heavy-limbed and plethoric. The music was appalling. It was produced out of a piano, a cello, and a violin driven by three Japanese who cared nothing for time or tune. Each dance, evidently, was timed to last ten minutes. At the end of the ten minutes the music stopped without finishing the phrase or even the bar; and the movement of the dancers was jerked into stability. Reggie entered the room with Yaé Smith. His manner was unusually excited and elate. "Hello, Geoffrey, enjoying yourself?" "No," said Geoffrey, "my wife has got a headache; and that music is simply awful." "Come and have a drink," proposed Reggie. He took them aside into the bar and ordered champagne. "This is to drink our own healths," he announced, "and many years of happiness to all of us. It is also, Geoffrey, to drive away your English spleen, and to make you into an agreeable grass-widower into whose hands I may commend this young lady, because you can dance and I cannot. My evening is complete. This is my _Nunc Dimittis._" He led them back to the ballroom. Then, with a low bow and a flourish of an imaginary cocked-hat, he disappeared. Geoffrey and Yaé danced together. Then they sat out a dance; and then they danced again. Yaé was tiny, but she danced well; and Geoffrey was used to a small partner. For Yaé it was sheer delight to feel the size and strength of this giant man bending over her like a sheltering tree; and then to be lifted almost in his arms and to float on tiptoe over the floor with the delightful airiness of dreams. What strange orgies our dances are! To the critical mind what a strange contradiction to our sheepish passion-hiding conventions! A survival of the corroboree, of the immolation of the tribal virgins, a ritual handed down from darkest antiquity like the cult of the Christmas Tree and the Easter Egg; only their significance is lost, while that of the dance is transparently evident.