"I see," she said. "We insist on looking through a tinted film that makes everything iridescent?" "And deflects the lines of forms. The Japanese art is less artificial. Now--turn to the left." In one spot the trees and shrubbery had been cut clean away, and through the vista she saw the distant mountains, clear and pure as though carved of tinted jade set in a plate of lapus lazuli. A faint curdle of cloud frayed from their jagged tops, and above it hung the dreamy snow-clad cone of Fuji, palely emerald as the tint of glaciers under an Alaskan sky. A single crow, a jet-black moving spot, flapped its way across the azure expanse. "The one touch of blue," he said. "The color ethical, the color pantheistic, the color of the idea of the divine!" His personality, so touched with mystery, interested Barbara intensely. The sense of strangeness and unfamiliarity had quite vanished. She sat down on one of the warm boulders. Thorn rested one foot on the bent trunk of a dwarf tree and leaned his elbow on his knee, his hand, in the gesture that seemed habitual, covering his eye. In the wide _kimono_ sleeve the forearm was bare and suggested a peculiar physical cleanliness like that of a wild animal. "How strange it is," she said, "that for centuries, the western world believed this wonderful land inhabited by a barbarous people--because it didn't possess western civilization!" He made an exclamation. "Civilization! It is a hateful word! It stands in the West for all that is sordid and ugly. It has bred monstrous, thundering piles built up to heaven, eternally smoking the sky--places of architecture and mechanics gone mad, where one lives by machinery and moves by steam, and is perpetually tormented by absurd conventions. I have lived in its cities. I have walked their selfish streets, shy and shabby and hungry!" "Hungry!" "Yes--and worse. I've not spoken of those experiences for years. I don't know why I speak of them now to you. Does it surprise you to hear that I have known poverty?" For the first time he turned fully facing her. His supple hand had left his brow and moved in gestures at one time fierce and graceful. "When I was sixteen I learned what penury meant in London. Once I was driven to take refuge in a workhouse in some evil quarter of the Thames. My memory of it is a mixture of dreadful sights and sounds--of windows thrown violently open or shattered to pieces--of shrieks of murder--of heavy plunges in the river."