Barbara shuddered in the warm sunlight. Over the edge of the garden was a misty space where foliage and roofs sank out of sight, to rise again in long undulations of green trees and gray tiling, like a painted ocean. Far away lifted the leafy plateau of Aoyama, with its blur of terra-cotta barracks. At an immense distance a great temple roof jutted, and still farther away the spread-out, populous city curved up, like the rim of a basin, to a hazy horizon. Yet on this background of pleasantness and peace those other scenes of horror--such was the vehemence of his tone, the savage directness in his phrases--seemed to start up, blank and wretched apparitions, before her. "At nineteen," he went on. "I found myself in New York, delicate, diffident, satanically proud, and without a friend--one of the billion ants crawling in the skeleton of the mastodon. I was threadbare and meals were scant and uncertain--a little, penniless, half-blind, eccentric wanderer! I lived in a carpenter-shop and slept on the shavings. One week I sold coral for a Neapolitan peddler. Oh, I learned my civilization well! The very memory now of walking down those roaring cañons of streets--all cut granite and iron fury, and hideous houses two hundred feet high--moos at me in the night! It is frightful, nightmarish, devilish! And when one can be here under a violet sky, in sight of blue peaks and an eternally lilac, luke-warm sea!" His hand swept across the hewn vista--to the wild, bold background of indigo hills, with its slender phantom above them, swimming in the half-tropical blue. "It is better," he said, "to live in Japan in sack-cloth and ashes, than to own the half of any other country. I am as old as the three-legged crow that inhabits the sun. I can't read the comic papers or a French novel. I shouldn't go to the Paris opera if it were next door. I shouldn't like to visit the most beautiful lady and be received in evening dress. I shall pass my life in sandals and a _kimono_, and when it's over I shall be under the big trees in the old Buddhist cemetery there, beside the nunnery, among the fireflies and grasshoppers, with six laths above me, inscribed with prayers in an unknown tongue and a queerly carved monument typifying the five elements into which we melt away." He shook his broad shoulders. Again his hand went to his brow and he half turned away.