Woman, thought Geoffrey, should be supple and pliant, with a suggestion of swiftness galvanising the delicacy of the lines. Atalanta was his ideal woman. But this creature had apparently no bones or sinews. She looked like a sawdust dummy. She seemed to have been poured into a bag of brown tissue. There was no waist line. The chest appeared to fit down upon the thighs like a lid. The legs hung from the hips like trouser-legs, and seemed to fit into the feet like poles into their sockets. The turned-in toes were ridiculous and exasperating. There was no shaping of breasts, stomach, knees and ankles. There was nothing in this image of clay to show the loving caress of the Creator's hand. It had been modelled by a wretched bungler in a moment of inattention. Yet it stood there, erect and challenging, this miserable human tadpole, usurping the throne of Lais and crowned with the worship of such devotees as Patterson and Wigram. Are all women ugly? The query flashed through Geoffrey's brain. Is the vision of Aphrodite Anadyomene an artist's lie? Then he thought of Asako. Stripped of her gauzy nightdresses, was she like this? A shame on such imagining! Patterson was hugging a girl on his knee. Wigram had caught hold of another. Geoffrey said--but nobody heard him,-- "It's getting too hot for me here. I'm going." So he went. His little wife was awake, and disposed to be tearful. "Where have you been?" she asked, "You said you would only be half an hour." "I met Wigram," said Geoffrey, "and I went with him to see some _geisha_ dancing." "You might have taken me. Was it very pretty?" "No, it was very ugly; you would not have cared for it at all." He had a hot bath, before he lay down by her side. CHAPTER VI ACROSS JAPAN _Momo-shiki no Omiya-bito wa Okaredo Kokoro ni norite Omoyuru imo!_ Though the people of the Great City With its hundred towers Be many, Riding on my heart-- (Only) my beloved Sister! The traveller in Japan is restricted to a hard-worn road, dictated to him by Messrs. Thos. Cook and Son, and by the Tourists' Information Bureau. This _via sacra_ is marked by European-style hotels of varying quality, by insidious curio-shops, and by native guides, serious and profane, who classify foreigners under the two headings of Temples and Tea-houses. The lonely men-travellers are naturally supposed to have a _penchant_ for the spurious _geisha_, who haunt the native restaurants; the married couples are taken to the temples, and to those merchants of antiquities, who offer the highest commission to the guides. There is always an air of petty conspiracy in the wake of every foreigner who visits the country. If he is a Japan enthusiast, he is amused by the naive ways, and accepts the conventional smile as the reflection of the heart of "the happy, little Japs." If he hates the country, he takes it for granted that extortion and villainy will accompany his steps.