The Garden of Vision E-Book

Lily Adams Beck

• Herausgeber: E-BOOKARAMA
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

First published in 1929, "The Garden of Vision" treats the debt of Japan to Zen Buddhism.

Once again Lily Adams Becks sets her work in Asia, more specifically in Japan, as a great connoisseur of its culture and its society.

Leseprobe

Table of contents

THE GARDEN OF VISION

Preface

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

THE GARDEN OF VISION

Lily Adams Beck

Preface

A part of the debt of Japan to Zen Buddhism (one aspect of that all-embracing faith) is treated in this book. So far as I know and believe there is no exaggeration of that debt and there is certainly none in my statement of the coincidence of its teachings with those of Western Science. The Nō play in Chapter XI of which Lady Murasaki is the heroine is my own and is on the old Japanese model. Since, after the publication of “The House of Fulfilment,” countless readers wrote to ask for lists of books in which they could learn more of the subjects there treated I think I may give a very few names of the books which I have found extremely useful and some of which I have quoted.

ESSAYS IN ZEN BUDDHISM, by Professor D. Suzuki. ( Luzac, London).

THE NŌ PLAYS OF JAPAN, by Arthur Waley. ( Allen & Unwin).

THE FIGHTING SPIRIT OF JAPAN, by E. J. Harrison. ( Allen & Unwin).

THE CREATIVE EAST, by T. W. Mason.— Wisdom of the East Series.

A LUTE OF JADE, by L. Cranmer Byng.— Wisdom of the East Series.

THE NATURE OF THE PHYSICAL WORLD, by Professor A. S. Eddington. ( The Cambridge Press).

L. ADAMS BECK( E. Barrington)

Japan, 1929.

Chapter One

This is the story of certain things which befell in that strange and little-known country Japan—known indeed to many Western people, but only as one may know a beautiful woman passed in the street. A moment one looks and speculates on what may underlie the heart-hiding smile, the mysterious sweetness of the eyes which brush yours and are gone. But the meeting brings no knowledge. She has taken her own way and you remember but do not understand.

Indeed, it is true that one may be a long time in her presence and yet fail to understand. That man, Lafcadio Hearn, who of all Western men drew nearest to her, proclaimed her manifold charms in exquisite words, studied her, besought her grace with longing, was yet compelled to own when he left her forever that her mysteries were more inscrutable at the end of many years spent at her feet than at the beginning. Perhaps it was because one may recognize a beautiful body, a crystalline keen brain, and yet miss all in missing the secret of the spirit that is the life of both. Therefore this book is an attempt to give what I know of the third of that strange trinity, and since I myself share the deepest faith of Japan it may give wind-driven glimpses of the moon of thought which shines on a world so lovely that it is easier to dwell on what is illumined than on the remote splendor by which it is seen. But glimpses only. What is there that can be wholly loved unless the essence of its being is shared?

This story is strange in its beginning, its present and future, and yet must be told because its bright light may illumine devious ways for others as it did for those happy lovers whom the world might count unhappy because it could not pluck out the heart of their mystery.

It began in London, in a flat in Camborne Road, large and sunny, overlooking the trees of Kensington Gardens, where many Asiatic people felt themselves at home, English though it was. Its mistress knew not only Japan but many countries of Asia, and her knowledge and sympathy gave her a position apart from that of other Europeans. It was said of her that her windows opened to all the lands of the sunrise, and that was certainly her desire. Her name was Eleanor Ascham.

Many Japanese came, Indians, many Chinese and others, glad of a friend who could understand them, who knew their philosophies, faiths, and the influences which had shaped them into what they were, however strange their shaping might seem to Western minds. Strange indeed, as the Western mind must seem to them. She was one who could calculate the exact width of the gulf, wide or narrow, where the dangerous leap must be made before East and West can join hands.

They called her the Builder of Bridges, because each of the Asiatic countries knows that gulf well, and knows how in the attempt to overleap it many explorers, Eastern and Western, have either shied or missed step and fallen into the boiling torrent of misunderstanding beneath.

A bridge, however slender, however quivering in the wind, is better than a leap in the dark, and though no one had less opinion of her own importance than herself she knew that she held hands on either side. This story does not concern her, however, except that many of its flying tints and rainbows were reflected through her mind and could not have been caught without it.

Japanese men and women from diplomatic circles, students of scientific and literary subjects, artists, business men, all came and went in that drawing-room where the ends of the earth met as surely as the mapped Equator girdles it.

But this story turns upon one who came there oftener than others, profoundly needing at the moment the atmosphere of comprehension it offered. His name, reversed Western fashion, was Yasujiro Ito. A man with powers restrained and chastened in the Japanese manner, which insists that with well-bred persons unseen qualifications should be more sensitively beautiful and valuable than those inevitably displayed for general notice.

A deep-eyed, black-browed man of thirty whose face had a masked beauty and fire hidden under reserve so intense, covered with such skill in listening, that his reputation as a delightful talker was great among English people unqualified to recognize “the perfect artist who plays impeccably upon the wide and subtle registers of Japanese silence.” Tributes to his charm often reached Eleanor Ascham. As thus:

“I don’t like the Japanese. All surface. No real feeling. But I always except that nice Ito. The most sympathetic talker and always says the right thing. He really might be an English gentleman. But of course he’s been here for years, and they know what to pick up.”

Eleanor Ascham smiled and let it pass. London likes to consider itself a University of Manners, and how could people whose horizon was bounded by London and its fashionable resorts understand the aristocratic type dear to great Japanese artists or the intellectual value of Ito’s black-browed beauty smooth as a polished sword and ready also to glitter into swordplay at a moment’s notice? How could these people understand his life-deep passion for loveliness, worn as silently as a man hides a woman’s face in his heart, an unchanging inspiration working behind all he says and does, unconsciously swaying every word, thought and deed, whether spiritual or material?

She herself knew a very different man in him—one of grave thought and introspection, contemplating the Western World through very calm and disillusioned eyes, the Buddhist indifference to the Mirror of the Passing Show strong upon him. She knew and sympathized with that attitude, but even to her his purpose remained uncertain. Then he had gone suddenly to Japan and had returned a few months ago. She felt sure that that visit had crystallized some resolve; but though he came to see her as often and with the most trustful friendship, nothing definite had been said. To her he talked freely,—good talk embracing all interests, iridescent with romance and poetry held in check by ironic humor—but behind all she recognized a deep slowly maturing purpose, silent as a taut harp-string waiting the sweeping finger.

They came nearer and nearer to it on those happy evenings when the fire burned bright in the lamp-lit room and two chairs only were drawn up beside it. Then, in his beautiful almost overeducated English, he would hover on the edge of revelation, his face pale in shifting lights and glooms. That was the time he counted upon, and then, too often, just as the good minute dawned, the door would open and another guest set up a new chemical combination that spoiled his hopes.

Yet he always felt his was the first claim. He had known her for some years—ever since his mother, dying with the silent heroism of a Japanese lady, had sent him first to an English tutor and then to Oxford, depriving herself of precious years together because she believed it would be for his good. Eleanor understood as he did the agony of that sacrifice, and this and another deep mutual understanding of shared faith made them friends.

But it had grown much less easy to find her alone since he had come back from his last visit to Japan. A girl—repellent to him from every point of view except that of good looks which no one could deny—had established a kind of right to come and go as she pleased in that happy haven where so much of his life and thought in England had developed. He could never reckon on her absence, and under the strain even his iron Japanese courtesy had shown a tendency to—let us say—rust! Eleanor was quick to observe the signs of disintegration.

“You don’t like Yasoma Brandon. You would like her better if you knew her story. Ask me to tell it some day.”

“I would not waste one of your words on it,” he answered with brevity. “She is the sort of modern young woman—But, no. Why should I criticize your friend? I beg your pardon for what I have said.”

“Certainly my friends mustn’t be criticized to me. Do you suppose I would let anyone criticize you?”

A transfiguring smile lit his eyes and mouth with sunshine. At once he looked a boy and a happy one, full of trust and gaiety.

“If you order it I shall be her knight and defend her always against all comers. But she has so many friends that she has no need of the samurai sword, and I shall only say ‘Mrs. Ascham’s friend’ . . . That is sufficient.”

Eleanor laughed:

“I won’t go so far as to ask you not to quarrel with her when you meet her here, because I know you can’t help it, and I can leash you both when the cut and thrust is too dangerous. But I wish you’d tell me what you said about us in Japan this time. Things move so quickly here and I have often wanted to ask you. Sometimes I’ve seen in your face—”

Now he was grave and on his guard again. He looked much older; between his knitted black brows was a line of thought.

“Then it is my ill manners if you have,” he said seriously. “Shall a guest criticize a host?”

“But if the host said, ‘The house I live in is imperfect. It could be made better. Help me to think how’—what would you say?”

“That his welcome had made it so pleasant that all else escaped me.” Ito answered with serenity.

“Yes—and when you returned to your own home you would speak freely! Is that quite honest?”

He was silent a moment. Then:

“No, not quite honest. We must criticize. But you are you and I would not wound you. Though indeed nothing I could say would have any effect in comparison with an ironically honest letter I have just had from a Frenchman—a friend of my two years in Paris who has fled to Saigon from Europe. The West may criticize the West.”

“May I see it? Can honesty harm anyone?”

“Perhaps not. I shall mark certain passages for you to read. Parts are foolish and prejudiced. In some I think he is right. In any case the whole world depends upon the relations between men and women.”

“Thank you. Describe him, please. I want to understand. Then read the beginning as far as you will.”

“A good man,” he said reflectively, “and wise—in patches. But injured by an unworthy wife.”

He began reading the French with the same ease as English. His voice was delightful, a male sonority with the shifting quality of music and indescribable sensitiveness to the meanings of words—an expressive instrument indeed for thought! Eleanor had always been able to detach it by its beauty from the voices of any group of people who were speaking.

“My life here would be called dull by many, but to me its inexpressive peace is the first repose I have known since I realized the truth of the life to which I was chained in France. Will you think it strange if I say that much of this is due to my observation of the women here as contrasted with those of Europe and America? Of yours I dare not speak, since Japan is an unknown country for me. What do these Western women give us? Never repose. Stimulation rooted in cold hearts and therefore the freer to practice all the lures, driven to excess which goads the senses to the apathy in which Delilah may ask and take all from Samson. Puerilities of intellect, which we admire because the ages have taught us how little is to be expected and which we dare not confront with an empty flourish and compliment such as our wiser ancestors used. The instincts of the vulgar shown in their prodigality of luxury, their violence of jealousy, the ape-like avidity and cruelty with which women snatch from each other and from man the commodities that alone satisfy their petty souls.

“And these are the creatures that some great countries have enfranchised and entrusted with a voice in the deliberation of their affairs! On them we stake our future as empires and nations. To their verdict we commit the future of the arts—at the very portals of whose temples they are unworthy to enter! Yes, they paint—and not only their faces. They write, and not only their love-letters. You are aware that I read English as my own tongue. I have studied the literary expression of the English-speaking exponents of this situation with profound amazement. The genius of the French language debars us from the obscenities commingled with sentiment in which the Anglo-Saxon genius is preeminent, though I admit that certain continental stocks grafted into an Anglo-Saxon setting across the water run them close.”

Ito paused and took out a pencil, drawing it lightly down certain pages, and gave the letter to Eleanor. She took it and read on.

“As a result of reading many of these writers, male and female, I declare that only woman has the power to corrupt the heart and pen of man and that if she had not led the way he would never have followed. I own his occasional brutalities in former ages, but they were neither decadent nor diseased. Nor did men and women gesticulate together in public over their emotions to urge a jaded passion. Now all is changed. Woman, alone of animals, had made pursuit dull, for we were never able to convince her that enough surpassed any feast—but it has now been reserved to her to make it supremely ridiculous. Permit me to offer a few modern instances.”

“I think,” said Ito with a gravity very grateful to Eleanor’s sense of humor, “that here you will pass on and begin lower down where it is unmarked.”

She agreed with a Mona Lisa smile imperceptible in flickering firelight and the glimmer of a little silver lamp at his elbow and resumed:

“Could fatuity go further? Dear friend, let us vomit and pass on relieved. To what? To those books where male writers also, having eaten the apple tendered by Eve and rendered incoherent by passion, seize the dictionary in quivering fingers and scatter its golden showers Jove-like to impregnate their panting pages with the energies of a god worshiped in all nations. One remarkable sign I observe is a literary interest in the internal organs reserved until lately for the inspection of the medical press. Others spare us no single intimacy of obstetrics and all the collateral issues. I am told that in the West intelligent men do not read novels though many write them. Is this true? If so, we have the measure of feminine appreciation. In the West none have the courage to affront the Bacchæ in their orgies and to meet the fate of the man who dared. My flight declares my own terrors.

“My friend, you will return before long from the senile follies of the West—I congratulate you! The male spirit of Europe has resolved itself into the type of the dotard who concedes all to the scornful hands of women who even in taking his gifts despise him for yielding them. Its habit of mind is incurably amorous. I believe this type is known in America as the sugar daddy; correct me if I err. I see the manhood of Europe and America as the sugar daddy, too senile to contest the domination of the feminine ferment of destruction in their midst. Women and democracy—in both cases organized ignorance and therefore correlated—have already written the doom of the proud civilizations of the West. If the Far Eastern nations can profit by this lesson the future is their own.”

“Will you read more?” asked Ito. “I think better not!”

“A little.” She continued to read:

“And owing to the senile sexuality of the Western man, women are set apart everywhere as a favored caste. No longer are they human—even justice bows before them. Lately in my own country four atrocious murderesses—more than one a murderess of children—were condemned to the guillotine. All were reprieved and will doubtless return in a few years to bless the world and propagate their species. No, my friend, I exaggerate not at all when I say it is not India but the West which is the devotee of the ancient sex worships, untroubled by any of the spiritualities which attend them east of Suez.

“I shall not speak of the gentle unspoiled women among whom I live. You know them as I do. Nor of the need of calm and balanced mothers for the next generation, unlike the neurotic feminine products of the war with ill-functioning glands, hurrying from business to pleasure and pleasure to business. Nor of the hard undersexed young women who experiment curiously, half carelessly, devoid alike of modesty and wisdom.”

“I think that is enough,” said Eleanor, returning the letter. “Thank you so much.”

“Sex?” said a clear assertive voice which startled them. “So that rising tide has covered your abode at last, Eleanor! After all, what is so interesting? I suppose you’ve given her the latest news from Japan, Mr. Ito. I hear things are moving there.”

They had not noticed that the door had opened softly a few minutes before, and the firelight had hidden in its shadows a girl who listened intently, her hand lightly laid on the back of a chair.

“Do you allow a hard undersexed young woman devoid alike of modesty and wisdom to get a word in edgeways?” she asked sardonically.

Defenseless in the presence of a feminine attack, though half despising the convention that tied him, he stood up and, bowing Japanese fashion, drew a chair for Yasoma Brandon to the fire. In her presence he always and instantly assumed his nationality like an armor of steel, and was impenetrable and even more silent than usual.

Eleanor looked up with an unruffled smile:

“Sit down and behave yourself! Listeners deserve what they get, but no one attacked you and you have nothing to defend. Mr. Ito was reading a Frenchman’s letter which doesn’t concern you at all.”

“Yes, and agreeing with every word! Why shouldn’t I say what I think? If he thinks so little of England I think just as little of Japan. All the world says of Japan—‘Little in great things, great in little things.’ We, at all events, don’t take life with a giggle, and live on a reputation for arranging flowers. We’re tremendously big in everything we do—good or bad.”

“Even in the colossal scale of our bad manners! That really needed no demonstration!” Eleanor said laughing. Her eyes met Ito’s. “Laugh at her. It’s worth no more!” they said gaily. But he was silent, and the torrent flowed on unabated:

“Bad manners? Surely to borrow everything from another nation and then abuse it is not exactly polite? Oh, not only this time! Whenever we meet he says or looks something that makes one furious! If Japan did not like our civilization, why not have let it alone?”

“But then we should have remained uncivilized,” said Ito seriously. “Consider our loss! At a dinner in Paris some years ago one of the guests spoke of us before the Japanese Ambassador as having been uncivilized before 1868 and then hurriedly apologized. The ambassador agreed with you, Miss Brandon. He said: ‘Pray don’t apologize. You are quite right. Before 1868 we produced great painters and craftsmen. Now we make cannon and battleships like you. We are civilized!’—How true!”

Eleanor clapped her hands. There was a menacing silence from Yasoma Brandon. She knew too much of Japanese art to miss the point of that story. Her dead father’s collection of old Chinese and Japanese pictures as well as screens was famous all over Europe and in the Far East, and its beauty had shaped her mind in more ways than as yet she herself understood. Ito had seen it and knew exactly where to drive his dart.

She lifted her head at last.

“One to you! Still, yours is a cramped, borrowed tradition. What about great plays, great literature? Plenty of pretty things, I grant you, but—”

It was grossly unfair and she knew it, but would not withdraw.

“‘Great in little things and little in great ones,’” Ito repeated meditatively. Then lifted his head with flashing eyes. “I accept that. It is true, but—according to Europe’s standard of values. The things you think great are little to those of us who think in our own fashion. Money, success, position, to be asked to the best houses! We are little indeed in our care of these. We are great in the things you think little—beauty, joy, a little laughter, and an eternal faith. Yes—in these little things we are great. Trifles, I own, but—we like them. Idle, perhaps, as carving a walnut-sized bit of ivory into a work of eternal beauty. Yet, possibly worth consideration.”

“That isn’t fair. That’s a quibble!” said the other.

An angry jet of flame broke from the crumbling log on the andirons and lit her face. A girl of twenty-four with the broad half-moon-shaped forehead of the Artemis of the Louvre, brows straight and black as Ito’s own, clear-featured, with a scornful red mouth and great dark gray eyes clear as sea-water and alive with possibilities of storm in broken weather—and a rain-cloud of black hair framing all. She sat up straight and arrogantly defiant in her chair. Her figure, shaped for strength and energy, more like a boy’s than a woman’s, was the extreme of fashion and suited her attitude. Nothing clinging, submissive, or imploring about that young woman, thought Ito, with some answering defiance born of his oriental blood. And then the light flickered and dwindled, and her beauty was something seen in dusky shadows, receding and vanishing, only the eyes left bright and living, the rest secreted in a spiritual loveliness.

They knew each other little as yet, but there was an attraction of repulsion between them which led to skirmishings detested by Ito and amusing to the girl. Courtesy forbade flight, manhood obliged him to defend his positions, with the result that they always parted bitterly and drew together again, much against his liking, to renew some discussion which he could not avoid and hated to renew in Eleanor Ascham’s presence.

“And why is it a quibble?” he asked coldly. His years in Europe had not used him to this kind of self-assertion in a young woman. She divined all this and more in his indifferent voice and answered sharply:

“Because you’re answering a thing we didn’t say and evading what we did say. After all, your great things ought to be the same as other nations’ patriotism, decency, honor. These are the same for everybody.”

He answered slowly and still indifferently:

“And in all those you assert that the Japanese people are little? Well—have it so! Believe if you will that my people know little of patriotism, decency, and honor. I grant you that in my religious certainties I place neither a jeweled heaven nor a personal God. . . . But—”

She cut across his words abruptly and unreasonably. “I never said that. I wasn’t talking of such things. I was talking of art, and you know it. You don’t fight fair.”

It was time for intervention. Eleanor felt the undertone of contempt in Ito’s thought at this foolish fencing. Certainly Yasoma and her like missed many opportunities of the empire they apparently set first of earthly joys. Women should have perfect self-possession and audacity, but it remains unwise to brandish them. A man may wear a sword with grace but not a woman. She who hides them under the modesty of the odalisque is omnipotent, with the only omnipotence she is likely to desire.

“You have never seen Japan. Mr. Ito is the only Japanese you know. He and I are overwhelmed by the unfortunate impression he has made, but why generalize from it when you can run out to Japan for a month and then come back and hurl destruction all about you with really leisured criticism? Be fashionable as well as brilliant!”

Irony always brought Yasoma into the open, striking wild:

“I?” Her brows were stormy. “I certainly don’t feel inclined to waste my time like that! Life is short enough already. No, thank you! All I mean—and I stick to it—is that Europe has scored success in all the things worth living for, and what right has Asia to preach her stale old moralities about women to us?”

Eleanor measured her sword and thrust.

“You, a university woman ask that? I thought you took honors in history! For one reason, because Asia has studied psychic science for thousands of years and knows more about women than all the psychoanalysts from here to Vienna. That is why Woman never dominates in the East, but the woman of power enough to fight her way to the front is always accepted, because they can’t keep her out. Here we push the whole mass of them into the fighting line and crowd out the men and dominate the situation by numbers. No, in the East they don’t talk of woman; they know Woman is about as misleading as all the other goddesses. They deal with women, and when one that is strong enough comes along she deals with them! You can’t keep back the right people.”

Ito listened with quiet enjoyment. Now was the moment for a word to the weakening enemy.

“That is very true. If Europe is the brain of the world—which I cannot really accept—the East at least represents its soul. From the East have come all the faiths and psychics and the roots of all the philosophies. You would not be the ardent Christian you are, Miss Brandon”—his voice was edged with laughter—“if a Jewish young man had not what the Americans call ‘put it over’ on you!”

Silence. Yasoma Brandon resented the ascription of ardent Christianity so warmly that for a moment wrath strangled her. But no answer occurred to her, and she found Ito’s challenge so irritating that the best way of dealing with the situation was evidently to end it. She rose.

“We always quarrel when we meet, so I’m putting off the pleasure until the next time to give you time to think up your thrusts. After all what does it matter?—I must be getting on to the Twelve Arts’ Ball. May I switch on, Eleanor?”

She did it, and light poured upon a most brilliant figure. She wore a stiff belted coat, like that of a Russian moujik, of shoaling sea-blues and greens playing into each other with living light. It was embroidered at the edges in great Russian designs in pearls and many-colored jewels which had the appearance of gorgeous reality and barbaric splendor. Beneath it, showing when she moved, was a dress of thinnest Eastern transparency covered with peacocks in their pride. Her black hair knotted on her neck was bound with a wide trellis-band of small diamonds, from which at each side sprang a long slender diamond feather, bending and swaying fantastically, like the antennæ of some tropic butterfly. Her very shoes were extravagantly jeweled.

He had not a notion what the dress was meant to represent, but to him it conveyed the idea of stiff Byzantine splendor—a young empress seen through pre-Renaissance eyes, so loaded with riches that all free movement of the body was inhibited, even the fingers and thumbs stiffened with great rings from which shone, like watchful eyes, smooth polished emeralds, rubies, and ocean-blue sapphires.

His austere Japanese taste revolted at the overdone display. To him it suggested ill breeding, impossible to the most despised class in Japan. Nakedness would have seemed chaster. Beautiful, yes—but beauty dashed with defiance and challenge, which shrieked for admiration, unsexed itself and inspired repulsion instead of desire.

She brushed Eleanor’s cheek with a kiss and said coolly to Ito:

“I don’t shake hands for two reasons. First, it isn’t your custom. Secondly, I never shake hands with an enemy until the battle is over and one of us down. Good night.”

He bowed and escorted her to the lift, closed the doors, and returned to the drawing-room smiling at some thought of his own. He turned off the bright lights at a sign from Eleanor, leaving only one shaded glimmer to aid the firelight in its struggle with brimming shadows.

Chapter Two

“You don’t like her?” Eleanor said, smiling also. “And yet—”

“Yes—and yet?”

“Well, you certainly couldn’t keep the peace tonight. It wasn’t your fault. And yet—I know no one in the world more courageous and, in a way, chivalrous. And her love of beauty—outside moral values, I grant—sweeps her off her feet. She has thought very little, but she has read immensely. There are very few things that don’t interest her. Hers is a most responsive intellect. But she has a difficult life. Rich, alone in the world, no one to be responsible to, spoilt to death by the wild set she lives in, racing madly to be ahead of the latest fashion—and yet, with it all, the most lovable being the minute you understand her.”

He rejoined politely:

“But extremely difficult to understand, surely?”

She laughed with a note of desperation:

“Oh, impossible to explain anyone to anyone else! But she’s worth knowing. Tremendous energy. A splendid swimmer, walker, rider—an expert at jujutsu—”

He made a little sound of astonishment.

“I thought she hated everything Japanese.”

“Not she! Your national code of honor and patriotism is the very thing to capture her. And her touch of oriental blood—”

“Oriental?”—The shell of politeness cracked in a moment. He was alive and interested.

“You haven’t heard that? Her great-great-grandmother was an Indian princess who eloped with Sir Godfrey Brandon. He was in the employment of the East India Company. He brought her to England after they married, and she made him an excellent wife. A long way back, but to me Yasoma’s beauty is always a blossom of the true East. Her courage and daring are partly English, I suppose. It certainly makes her a thing apart from the average English girl, and more than once I’ve seen the two strains clash. Everyone calls her Soma, but her real name is Yasoma. It has been handed down from the princess.”

He was silent, digesting this very unexpected revelation. She saw it and lapsed into silence, wondering how it would affect their stormy intercourse.

Asiatics hang together and very naturally. Did not a thrill run through India when Japan faced the Russian Bear and humbled his pride? But it was so little—that one drop in the current of noble blood that had run in Brandon veins since the days of the Queen of France, sister of Henry VIII, who had married Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk! Could it affect anything but the fair outside? Could it engrave the resistant English character with the something which made Yasoma aloof and bewildering at moments, not only to the gay crowd she lived in but also to Eleanor? A million people would answer, “Never!” but Eleanor was not sure. There were moments when alien eyes looked at her from underneath Yasoma’s black brows—a something which flatly denied the code imposed by long English training. Yet might not her recklessness be the backwash reaction of the war—the dry rot that has set in and set free the instinct to snatch at coarse pleasures and easy satisfactions?

To Ito this could not occur. In his intercourse with her he had simply seen the West snarling at the East across “salt, estranging seas” of misunderstanding. He took her for the type of abrupt-mannered English girl willing to take the obvious sexual advantages and sneer at the far more potent and subtle ones which lie deep below the surface, and in addition he saw the Western crudity which almost invariably asks the wrong questions and has the wrong suspicions.

His silence lasted so long that Eleanor looked at him with interest and expectancy. She understood that the revelation might work as a strange leaven. It would be strange to discover the girl as not wholly one of the highly superior white people who considered they had taught Asia all she knew and were competent to mold the whole world into “civilization!” That consideration would work for peace. On the other hand, the dash of Asiatic blood was that of a conquered people! Japan the unconquered—she who drove back the mighty Kubla Khan with the power of China behind him, she who has been the first to look the white man in the eyes and say, “Thus far and no farther,” has many thoughts lying behind the smiling silence with which she surveys the nations of Asia and their overlords. Eleanor felt it would be curious to see how the quarrel would adjust itself on these new terms of knowledge.

“That’s rather interesting,” he said at last. “Then I suppose she feels it a disgrace and so overdoes her contempt of everything Asiatic. It accounts for a good deal. I wonder contempt for the Asiatic did not prevent a marriage between her ancestors. I believe that was the general attitude then—if indeed it has ceased.”

Eleanor looked at him in astonishment.

“Disgrace? She thinks—and so does everyone else—that it adds the last touch of romance to her background. One can take what happened a hundred years ago with that kind of gaiety. And as to Asia, she loves Asiatic art, and romance, and history. No!—to be painfully honest, I think she dislikes you—a whim, like so much else! She has never had to check a whim. No one in the world is freer. She’s the last of her family. A few distant cousins—nothing more. No ties, no land to look after, no responsibilities. She can please herself absolutely and not a soul to hinder her.”

She was conscious that this had not been good fortune so far for Yasoma. It had made her a rallying point for the revolt of youth, a kind of standard-bearer of rebellion. Where others went far she would go a little farther to show that all things are possible to people to whom life has been made easy. Eleanor, who had received a great deal of her careless confidence, could by no means place the line which bounded her in any direction. But if such a line existed she was very sure that whenever it pleased Yasoma to ignore boundaries it would vanish and a good deal else with it. And what that reaction would effect she could not tell.

These, however, were points not to be discussed with any man—especially an Asiatic. The attitude of Asiatic manhood to the sex question is uncertain in this transitional time, and the social history of Japan contains revulsions of feeling stretching from the time of great empresses and literary ladies who pleased themselves with regard to the other sex, and viewed their love-affairs with irony scarcely hidden beneath lovely lashes, to the epoch when Japan and Europe discovered one another and introduced respectively: a national womanhood taking a stand on its rights and claiming more daily from confounded and bewildered manhood; and a national womanhood, submissive, tender, fluttering to please its masters, stooping perpetually but with no intention of conquering. Of course that attitude is being tinctured with the Western spirit, but the instinct of mastership is still strong in the Island Empire of the East, and as yet Japan and the West find it difficult to be candid with each other on the fundamental. But it was interesting to watch Ito’s reaction, tempered impartially by Oxford and hereditary feeling, to what she had said. She knew well he could imagine none but the charming hetæræ of Japan in such an untrammeled freedom, and though the word “respectable” had no existence in his vocabulary he must think the defiance dangerous.

“And Miss Brandon lives alone!” he said at last, not as a question—for all the world knew that—but as one musing on the oddness of the situation.

“Certainly, except for a most devoted Irishwoman who was her nurse as a baby. Rather a remarkable woman in her way and strongly religious. But of course she has no control whatever over her mistress.”

Eleanor believed this statement, but Ito was quicker to feel that control may exist in terms of influence rather than command with a character like Yasoma Brandon’s. At all events he smiled.

“We have these faithful servants in Japan. Naturally, most humble, most dutiful, yet I have known them count for more than a little. It is perhaps best that Miss Brandon has some sensible person in her house.”

There was the faintest touch of sarcasm in the tone which Eleanor could not wholly accept.

“Sensible people are always an advantage, but she has the kind of strength which will certainly work out her problem to an answer.”

“Happily?”

“What sensible person asks for the happy working-out of a problem? What one wants from it is the stark truth of the answer. You ask that question, and you a Buddhist, bound to look upon all these things from the angle of the most scientific faith in all the world! How can she expect to achieve happiness of the sort you mean? Who does?”

He hurried to explain.

“You and I are both Buddhists and it is the glory of Buddhism that we have no dogmas and need not agree. What I really mean is—will she achieve the best that lies in her and make it helpful to the general good? And, now that I have said it, it would sound absurd to anyone in London but you.”

“I seldom rise on a wind of prophecy, but if you ask me I should say yes. I believe in twenty years’ time, perhaps less, there will be developments in her of strength and courage and honesty very surprising to those who know her now. She needs travel and wide intercourse with people of different race and mentality, and then—”

But she pulled herself up. There was no friendliness between the two, and explanation leads to copious misunderstandings. These things must be felt, not worded. He noticed her halt and respected it.

“What did she represent tonight?” he asked with indifference. “It was a very splendid dress.”

“A Russian lady of the time of Ivan the Terrible. Her partner—she always dances with the same man—is to wear an equally gorgeous one of slender chains of steel and copper in orientalized Tatar designs with long red silk tassels and a high crest of shaking gold wires, set with sparkling stones. A so-called great artist designed it from an old Russian picture. There’s a kind of pageant, and he will carry a balalaika and address her in a kind of recitation which begins—‘My fair sun, my falcon, my ermine!’ He is a very handsome young man, and they will be a splendid pair. They are always together in anything of this sort.”

It amused her a little to watch the cumulative effect of these revelations upon him. As she expected—distinct distaste.

“And you approve?”—with a look which included Eleanor for a moment in the ranks of the enemy.

“I? I neither approve nor disapprove. I think she might do better with her gifts. I think it rather silly. I also think ripe grapes are more to be relished than green ones. But one has to wait. Processes can’t be hurried.”

She could see the subject bored him, however, and added:

“Talk to me about yourself. There too I am sure change and processes have been at work. I have seen that since you came back.”

“You Buddhist sage!” he said, half grave, half smiling. “Yes, indeed I have wanted very much to talk with you. Will you give me half an hour now and would it be too much to ask you to say—’Not at home’?”

Orders were given, and he drew his chair nearer and instead of beginning gazed at the fire with dark and thoughtful eyes as if finding words a difficulty.

“Why cannot I think it to you?” he sighed at last.

“I think you nearly can. Shall I begin?”

He made a quick sign of assent.

“You told me long ago of your friendship with Mr. Arima and that he was a devoted Buddhist of the Zen type. You told me that he was starting a place in the hills of Japan where young men might be prepared to go through the great experience which we call a flash of the higher consciousness, and take as a matter of pure luck, and you call satori and take as a matter of discipline. What I have believed since you came back is that you have known that experience and that you will soon leave us for a very different life. Forgive me if I am wrong or have said too much.”

He looked at her in very great amazement.

“How did you know?”

“How could so great a thing happen to anyone and leave no mark? And are we not friends? But tell me what you can.”

He began slowly and as if weighing every word.

“You know that one fundamental difference between Christianity and our developed Buddhism is that Christianity teaches the doctrine of original sin and we teach that every living thing—and all things live—has the Buddha nature in itself and needs only to realize it to receive joy and peace and universal wisdom. For years I have been aiming at that—a stern discipline—but though I gained much, very much, I did not gain that. This time I went up to Arima in the hills. . . .”

There was a long silence, then after a while, but very softly, she said:

“You gained it?”

He looked up and said nothing, but she was answered.

Presently he spoke again:

“You know we do not think of the Buddha as an historical figure as they do in Ceylon and Siam. He was that of course, but it would not matter to us if he had not been. History like other facts in this phenomenal world matters little in reality as contrasted with ideas. Ideas really make the universe, for each is a fragment of Realization. Roughly one might say every god is real who is believed in. To us—in our scriptures, as you know, the Buddha as an historical figure is interesting, but in the Idea he is Universal Wisdom, the Law of the Cosmos—the One in whom all Laws are intelligible. You have read the Diamond Scripture? Wonderful!”

She repeated “Wonderful!” with dreaming eyes.

“Well, he is every idea that ever was or can be—the very essence of Mind. If one gets a flash of that and realizes it in one’s own mind it—it changes things.”

She said with hesitation: “Have you brought back any light you can give me?”

“The old Buddha light—the knowledge that all the things we see in this world are only apparent and the creation of our own mind. Of course that accords exactly with modern science. But that matters little, though the realization is an amazing experience. But the joy—the light—No, I cannot speak of it.”

Again a moment’s silence. She said: “I know. Now, what I think you will do is this—”

“Tell me!” he said. A Japanese does not flush with pleasure but his eyes kindled.

“You told me before that your long stay in Europe was to learn its ways and languages thoroughly. You have done that. I think now that you and Arima sama will train men to come to Europe and set forth the marvelous alliance of Buddhism with modern science—especially with physics and psychology here. Perhaps you will come yourself.”

Again his smile made him a boy. He leaned forward vibrating with eagerness.

“Yes—yes. But I must go back first. He is training two brilliant young men to come with me. Nothing monastic except in the training—all absolutely practical. Zen Buddhism is that from beginning to end. Do you think—will people listen? The aim of Zen is to form the Superman.”

“The best minds will. They must, now that physics and philosophy are running into each other’s channels. But I think something else. I am thinking what might happen if your people asserted their right to leadership of the world in certain forms of beauty and philosophy. India is being discovered as a seer, but not Japan. You have been too humble. Believe me, the stern gospel of your past, your samurai honor, your self-control, is the steel tonic that Europe wants now. That was your religion. Can nations live without religion? They are trying out that problem in the West, and it looks as if the answer might be astonishing.”

“You think that? It’s true. I have always said it. Therefore I am a student, a lover of Zen—the wisest, most intellectual form of all Buddhism. You know, you understand. . . . Is that what Europe wants? But they would laugh now if one spoke of it. I have kept my lips gripped.”

“One must keep them gripped on so many things in England,” she answered a little wistfully. “The Americans are much more eager and open-minded—‘The young impatient masters of the world.’ One may speak and write there as one pleases, and they read and listen and accept and reject with perfect freedom. Here, people simply don’t care a straw about anything Asiatic. But you, perhaps you could speak and write here.”

“Why could I?” He looked at her with profound interest.

“Because you would know how to do it, if you could divest your mind of the belief that there is a prejudice against the Japanese mentality.”

“But there is.”

“Yes, but they would listen to Japan as to no other Asiatic people. You have the reputation for common sense because you have succeeded handsomely in war and commerce. That would give you quite an authority in the religious field if you spoke up!”

“Religion!” he said with irony. “Hateful word!”

“Call it understanding of natural law. They would like that. Any application of common sense to religion or what they think is science is thought very reliable in England,” she said. “But to be serious”—for Ito was still digesting this—“the West needs an austere gospel. It is almost time for the Puritan reaction to set in which has saved England more than once on the edge of a precipice and then ruined it again with chains and fetters. You once made a discipline effective on all your best men and women. Recover it and tell us your secret. Oh, I know we talk of individuality and the right of self-assertion, but it always ends in the slump of laxity and self-pleasing ineffectuality.” She paused again and quoted:

“‘I have seen four and twenty leaders of revolts—’ and they and their followers always collapsed into bosh and bad art and license.”

“I see that myself in England—and in France. Also in Japan,” he said slowly. “Yes, it is true. Self-pleasing is always a fatuity in the long run, and the West has known no divine reason why it should bestir itself. But who cares? And we are beginning to walk in the same way.”

“Do you know what Ku Ming said, the old Chinese philosopher who died lately? I think it sums up the whole situation—‘Europe has a religion which satisfies her heart but not her head, and a philosophy which satisfies her head but not her heart.’ Could anything be truer? Well—we know a religion and a philosophy which could do both.”

He looked at her with shining eyes:

“Yes. Truer than true. But if we try—”

It was the first time she had been permitted to see the flame of the spirit in his eyes. Hitherto he had been silent, a commentator on life—shrewd, and sardonic, learning his lesson in close observation. She looked at him and wondered. Now the sword, dark and keen, of which he had always reminded her, was bared. Preparation had done its work, and the man was ready.

“Not perfectly ready,” he said, answering her thought after a strange fashion of his own. “A year more with Arima sama—and besides he needs my help out there. He is organizing a big thing, and I am to lecture in physics. I worked hard at that. Our men are to be ready for any class in Europe.”

She was so silent, her eyes so large with meditation, that he offered the usual penny for her thoughts and smiled when she shook her head.

“No, not yet. Tell me all your plans and I’ll say what I think. But tell me this first. Did you agree with that letter?”

“I prefer not to say unless I have your orders and forgiveness beforehand.”

“Both. I think a Japanese comment would be more useful than any.”

“Then, allowing for personal bitterness, I think my friend touches danger-signals. You have said yourself that in Asia men do not recognize Woman as an abstract goddess, but simply women. Simply human beings with certain highly specialized functions which are a national danger if they are exaggerated or neglected. Occasionally swift in intuition, undisciplined and less self-controlled than they should be, and therefore less fitted to control others. Their levity—of course I recognize the exceptions—unfits most of them for governing positions. And possibly, when vicious, more shallowly and hopelessly vicious. Please allow me to end here! I wish to say no more. I shall only agree with you that the exceptional woman must come to the front always. Why make the road easy for the rabble which is utterly unfitted for ruling? For my part, even for men I should make the road much more difficult than it is. But then I am no believer in the rule of the unfittest—which you call democracy—in any department of life. And does anyone value what they get as a matter of course?”

They sat late into the night while he told her of Arima’s work in the hills, of his strange and subtle personality with its unspoken but unlimited influence on others, and always her sympathy urged him on and her hope supported his; and at last, at first with deep reserve but later with simplicity and confidence, he permitted her to understand so far as the futility of words could express it—little enough!—the splendor of the vision which dims all the world’s radiance for the happy ones who see.

And Ito went away brooding on many things of which Yasoma’s insulting attacks and dislike formed no part.

Eleanor Ascham’s words had been fruitful in much more than she guessed—or he either for that matter—since he had known her. They had coalesced with potent influences reaching him from Japan, from a man whose strange and beautiful austerity had sown a seed in many hearts of men who watched the European whirlpool with keen speculation. What did it mean—this dance of death, this mad gaiety and loosening of all bonds of honor and family loyalty and obedience to old ideals? Had it been only in France or Germany or the half-civilized hordes of Russia and Central Europe, it would not have surprised Ito or his friends that such peoples should reel under the shock of war. But that this new devil’s dance of anarchy and the lust of pleasure should flourish in England, the country of tranquillity, where freedom broadens slowly down from precedent to precedent, was a thing worth watching, a portent of world-wide concern. Like other Asiatics also he was disposed to dread the English transference of the scepter of rule from the hands of men to women. He knew and vibrated to the knowledge that in India secret-eyed men of all the myriad Indian faiths would shudder with distaste at the spectacle of the women thronging to the poll with the unfledged reason and caprice which were to make or mar their own well-being under Indian skies. Such as Yasoma Brandon! Whom the gods wish to destroy they first make mad.

When he left Eleanor Ascham, the way he had chosen but had never mentioned in England grew fairer and fairer in his eyes. A chapter in his life had closed forever, and a way was opening.

Chapter Three

Meanwhile Yasoma, contemptuous of herself and the rest of her world, did not find the Twelve Arts’ Ball amusing. It was the old crowd. She knew exactly the paragraphs which some of them would write for the weekly and Sunday papers, vibrating with the information that Lady Gampion in an exquisite turn-out as a peacock had been chatting to Mr. Chappie Meredith—a screaming success as Cesare Borgia. Already one or two had come up to take details of her own dress, and Jimmy Maxwell’s. Tomorrow it would appear that Miss Yasoma Brandon had excelled all previous successes as the Russian Yelena and Mr. “Jimmy” Maxwell had ridden into the Albert Hall on a white horse with a purple velvet saddle with silver nails. The horse appeared to her the only sensible one of the party. She sickened of them, the men and women, some of family, some newly arrived, who eked out their means or reputations for fashion by vulgarly affecting intimacy with all the petty world in which they were so proud to move. Little coteries of poets and novelists whose words would be forgotten long before the breath was out of their bodies, cheap little groups of artists strong in nothing but what they considered the artistic temperament, people indecent, depraved, disastrous, symptoms of the almost mortal disease of their country, all surged past her, bubbling with empty laughter, sexual, unsexed, tedious the moment the glamor of novelty dropped from them; most unspeakably tedious in her eyes. But why had that glamor dropped? She had got along well enough before. She could not tell.

After their little special show she sat discontented, with Jimmy Maxwell, in a corner of the supper room veiled with banners and garlands, and looked on silently. He had suited her well enough hitherto, a good-looking man with hair as black as her own and insolent eyes, which to a certain extent had captured her by their audacity. Only to a certain extent—the final border was uncrossed, though there had been plenty of dangerous intimacy. He detested his wife. It seemed to him the most natural thing in the world that Yasoma should fill the very unaching void left by their alienation. He knew, and Yasoma knew, that their world gave them credit for an arrangement extremely natural and suitable which would certainly end in Jimmy’s divorcing his wife, or vice-versa and a light-hearted marriage between the survivors. That arrangement would have the more chance of lasting because her money was absolutely necessary to him and she was “an awfully good sort” about money. All the world knew that.

He sat now fanning her gently and noting with some amusement her slightly frowning brows as she watched the kaleidoscope pattern come and go about them. The latest to pass was his wife with a man better known than liked who had been her shadow for the last twelve months.

“Emerald’s going it tonight,” he said. “Thanks be! She’s grown to be such a little devil that things don’t click at all now unless she’s amusing herself. So I cheer her on. Philosophy, isn’t it?”

“Jolly good,” Yasoma answered without conviction. “But I say, Jimmy, have you come into a fortune? That’s a devastating frock she has on. It screams Paris at you.”

“Fortune be blowed!” he said, reaching for another cigarette. “As if I should spend my little all on Emerald when Kent Holland’s ready to do it for me. Besides, I haven’t got a dib. I’m about cleaned out.”

“Do you want me to lend you some, by any chance?” she said, yawning.

“Not such a rabbit by any manner of means, darling, but—”

“I wish you wouldn’t call me darling,” she interrupted irritably. “Everyone calls everyone ‘darling.’ This room is positively sopping with it. ‘Soma’ is good enough for you or anybody. Or you can take a chance on ‘Miss Brandon’ any day you like. Oh, Lord, how sick I am of all this! Give me some champagne.”

She never drank, and Jimmy Maxwell was joyously surprised.

“A very good move. Nothing like it for the blues. Have another?”

She took it, and still there was not the joyous reaction he expected.

“A really good cocktail is what you want. Goes to the spot at once. I’ll get you one.”

“That’s better,” she said at last with a sigh. “Get me another. Before I came here I had a shattering talk and I feel positively dank. I want things and I don’t know what they are. Look at this crowd for heaven’s sake! Look at that Pan and his Bacchantes and satyrs! The foulest, most disgusting creature that walks, and we all know it and endure him. And no joy in one of them. Nothing but half-drunken idiocy and the craving to be noticed anyhow. Look at Emerald! She’s half-seas-over with cocktails, and if I didn’t loathe drink I should be the same. I’m as dull as ditch-water and you’re duller. The fools we are! Can’t you do anything to amuse me? You make me drink to keep myself awake.”

It was an appeal, half insolent, half real. Before going to Eleanor Ascham’s she had stopped a moment in the long room which held her Chinese pictures, and their spiritual beauty had struck a nerve never numb in her and mysteriously responsive to something in Ito’s reserves and the coldness in his eyes that held her at resolute arm’s length. Why did the leap of a Chinese or Japanese waterfall from misty heights wake a kind of lost passion in one—a spiritual homesickness of which Western art had never known the secret? A memory? A hope? That rabble rout was a strange contrast to the lives of those other artists. Their grave lives of self-chosen poverty, carelessness of earthly reward, their sparse choice production. She had read of them. She knew.

“Oh, I’m sick of all this! Sick!” she said suddenly.

He put a hot hand on hers.

“Of course you are, darling. You and I are living the most confoundedly unnatural life ever known. It’s a frightful strain on us both; I can tell you my nerves are a mere razzle-dazzle and so are yours. Let’s be sensible. Let’s be happy while we can. Don’t you remember Clementi’s song—

“‘In delay there lies no plenty.

Then come kiss me, Sweet and Twenty!

Youth’s a stuff will not endure.’”

“I’ve never had any youth,” she answered, frowning still. “My mother chevied me from pillar to post—afraid I’d grow up and give away her age, I suppose. Well, she’s gone where growing old doesn’t matter. What a farce it all is!”

She looked in his painted face and doubted whether he were a man at all. Not certainly by any standard earlier than the after-war years.

“You look a monumental rabbit tonight, Jimmy,” she said politely, “and I can give you no points. Why do we come here?”

“Why indeed?” he said eagerly. “We should be a jolly sight more comfortable on the big sofa in your library. Come along—we’ve had enough.”

She looked at him and looked at herself in the little glass in her jeweled bag and touched her lips with unneeded red.

“Some champagne? No, nothing more. Won’t spoil my complexion. I don’t mind if we do go. Look at Alison’s dress split down to the waist. See what it is to have only one good point and stress it! Look at Ducie with the water-nymph melting in his arms. I hope she’ll hold herself together until they reach the dark corner where they’ve been half the night. Let’s have one more dance and go, unless you want to stay and look after Emerald. She wants looking after, I can tell you. I suppose, as her husband you’re responsible. Anyway you’re not in the dark as to her doings.”

“That’s certainly a humorous suggestion,” he said carelessly. “I should like to see myself looking after Emerald! And her face if I proposed it. Do come along. Let’s go.”

But she lingered: “Sometimes I wish, Jimmy, that we had the rouged and perfumed tricks of the old French court. They had grace at all events. This is too awful for words. Vulgarity—screaming to be noticed. Hideous! If they gave a prize for the peak of vulgarity here—everyone would get it.”

He would have agreed to anything she said. “Well—and very good fun! Come out of it. Give me your ticket and I’ll get your wrap.”

His eyes, hot and languid with wine, said what she could read perfectly well, and it did not matter. Was it worth her while to fight and hold men off for the sake of scruples long dead and buried? Why not go ahead and take all life gives and try to get some flavor out of it at last? After all—nothing counts but pleasing oneself, and like other women she might find some zest in a secret love-affair. She had skirted the edge so often—why not fall over and see what happened? And what she had heard of Ito’s letter stirred her to wild revolt. After all, women had as much right as men. . . .

Curiously, Ito’s face floated between her and the motley crowd, calm, inscrutable, neither interested nor contemptuous. A man of another race, a riddle insoluble. That kind of rabble neither amused nor repelled him—he was simply analytic. Yet he could laugh on the heroic scale when things stirred his humor. Laugh like a ridiculous boy.

Eleanor Ascham and he seemed to find eternal interests and energy in all the world about them. What was the secret and how could she hope to pluck out the heart of his mystery if she jeered at him every time they met? It was not surprising that a man of one of the great Asiatic races should be astonished at these casino manners, but what business had he to criticize? He hadn’t criticized? Well, what did that matter? It was easy to see what he thought. And Eleanor Ascham too. She had got into the way of haunting her flat because it was so interesting, even if her friends did call it damned highbrow. She wanted what Eleanor had though she did not even know its name.

But she roused herself. Maxwell was coming back with her ermine wrap. Men’s eyes followed him wrathfully. They would gladly have been in his place.

They threaded their way through the people and went down to her car, where the tired-out chauffeur sat in a crumpled heap asleep and forgetting his vigil. He pulled himself together, and they rolled smoothly away.

The gray line of dawn was not yet touching the London roofs, and she was inclined to think those reflections had been a momentary brain-sickness.