She returned to her circle of admirers, and Geoffrey to his studies of the Far East. He read the Lafcadio Hearn books, and did not perceive that he was taking opium. The wonderful sentences of that master of prose poetry rise before the eyes in whorls of narcotic smoke. They lull the brain as in a dream, and form themselves gradually into visions of a land more beautiful than any land that has ever existed anywhere, a country of vivid rice plains and sudden hills, of gracious forests and red temple gateways, of wise priests and folk-lore imagery, of a simple-hearted smiling people with children bright as flowers laughing and playing in unfailing sunlight, a country where everything is kind, gentle, small, neat, artistic, and spotlessly clean, where men become gods not by sudden apotheosis but by the easy processes of nature, a country, in short, which is the reverse of our own poor vexed continent where the monstrous and the hideous multiply daily. One afternoon Geoffrey was lounging on the terrace of the hotel reading _Kokoro_, when his attention was attracted by the arrival of Mme. Laroche Meyerbeer's motor-car with Asako, her hostess and another woman embedded in its depths. Asako was the first to leap out. She went up to her apartment without looking to right or left, and before her husband had time to reach her. Mme. Meyerbeer watched this arrow flight and shrugged her shoulders before lazily alighting. "Is all well?" asked Geoffrey. "No serious damage," smiled the lady, who is known in Deauville as _Madame Cythère_, "but you had better go and console her. I think she has seen the devil for the first time." He opened the door of their sunny bedroom, and found Asako packing feverishly, and sobbing in spasms. "My poor little darling," he said, lifting her in his arms, "whatever is the matter?" He laid her on the sofa, took off her hat, and loosened her dress, until gradually she became coherent. "He tried to kiss me," she sobbed. "Who did?" her husband asked. "The Vicomte de Brie." "Damned little monkey," cried Geoffrey, "I'll break every miserable bone in his pretence of a body." "Oh, no, no," protested Asako, "let us go away from here at once. Let us go to Switzerland, anywhere." The serpent had got into the garden, but he had not been a very adroit reptile. He had shown his fangs; and the woman had promptly bruised his head and had given him an eye like an Impressionist sunset, which for several days he had to hide from the ridicule of his friends.