"No really, is it as bad as all that? I was thinking that marriage meant just one extra person. It would have been fun having you both here, and this is the only place in Tokyo fit to live in." "It looks a comfortable little place," agreed Geoffrey. They had reached the secretary's house, and the newcomer was admiring its artistic arrangement. "Just like your rooms in London!" Reggie prided himself on the exclusively oriental character of his habitation, and its distinction from any other dwelling place which he had ever possessed. But then Geoffrey was only a Philistine, after all. "I suppose it's the photographs which look like old times," Geoffrey went on. "How's little Véronique?" "Veronica married an Argentine beef magnate, a German Jew, the nastiest person I have ever avoided meeting." "Poor old Reggie! Was that why you came to Japan?" "Partly; and partly because I had a chief in the Foreign Office who dared to say that I was lacking in practical experience of diplomacy. He sent me to this comic country to find it." "And you have found it right enough," said Geoffrey, inspecting a photograph of a Japanese girl in her dark silk kimono with a dainty flower pattern round the skirts and at the fall of the long sleeves. She was not unlike Asako; only there was a fraction of an inch more of bridge to her nose, and in that fraction lay the secret of her birth. "That is my latest inspiration," said Reggie. "Listen!" He sat down at the piano and played a plaintive little air, small and sweet and shivering. "_Japonaiserie d'hiver_," he explained. Then he changed the burden of his song into a melody rapid and winding, with curious tricklings among the bass notes. "Lamia," said Reggie, "or Lilith." "There's no tune in that last one; you can't whistle it," said Geoffrey, who exaggerated his Philistinism to throw Reggie's artistic nature into stronger relief. "But what has that got to do with the lady?" "Her name is Smith," said Reggie. "I know it is almost impossible and terribly sad; but her other name is Yaé. Rather wild and savage--isn't it? Like the cry of a bird in the night-time, or of a cannibal tribe on the warpath." "And is this your oriental version of Véronique?" 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. Véronique was personal; Yaé 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.