.

_Chonkina! Chonkina! Hoi!_

With a sharp cry the song and dance stopped abruptly. The six dancers
stood rigid with hands held out in different attitudes. One of them
had lost the first round and must pay forfeit. Off came the broad
embroidered sash. It was thrown aside, and the raucous singing began
afresh.

_Chonkina! Chonkina! Hoi!_

The same girl lost again; and amid shrill titterings the gorgeous
scarlet kimono fell to the ground. She was left standing in a
pretty blue under-kimono of light silk with a pale pink design of
cherry-blossoms starred all over it.

_Chonkina! Chonkina!_

Round after round the game was played; and first one girl lost and
then another. Two of them were standing now with the upper part
of their bodies bare. One of them was wearing a kind of white lace
petticoat, stained and sour-looking, wrapped about her hips; the other
wore short flannel drawers, like a man's bathing-pants, coloured in
a Union Jack pattern, some sailor's offering to his _inamorata_. They
were both of them young girls. Their breasts were flat and shapeless.
The yellow skin ended abruptly at the throat and neck with the powder
line. For the neck and face were a glaze of white. The effect of this
break was to make the body look as if it had lost its real head under
the guillotine, and had received an ill-matched substitute from the
surgeon's hands.

_Chonkina! Chonkina!_

Patterson had drawn nearer to the performers. His red face and his
grim smile were tokens of what he would have described as pleasurable
anticipation. Wigram, too, his flabby visage paler than ever, his
large eyes bulging, and his mouth hanging open, gazed as in a trance.
He had whispered to Geoffrey,--

"I've seen the _danse du ventre_ at Algiers, but this beats anything."

Geoffrey from behind the fumes of the pipe-smoke watched the unreal
phantasmagoria as he might have watched a dream.

_Chonkina! Chonkina!_

The dance was more expressive now, not of art but of mere animalism.
The bodies shook and squirmed. The faces were screwed up to express an
ecstacy of sensual delight. The little fingers twitched into immodest
gestures.

_Chonkina! Chonkina! Hoi!_

Geoffrey had never gazed on a naked woman except idealised in marble
or on canvas. The secret of Venus had been for him, as for many men,
an inviolate Mecca towards which he worshipped. Glimpses he had seen,
visions of soft curves, mica glistenings of creamy skin, but never