the
crude anatomical fact.

An overgrown embryo she seemed, a gawkish ill-moulded thing.

Woman, thought Geoffrey, should be supple and pliant, with a
suggestion of swiftness galvanising the delicacy of the lines.
Atalanta was his ideal woman.

But this creature had apparently no bones or sinews. She looked like
a sawdust dummy. She seemed to have been poured into a bag of brown
tissue. There was no waist line. The chest appeared to fit down upon
the thighs like a lid. The legs hung from the hips like trouser-legs,
and seemed to fit into the feet like poles into their sockets. The
turned-in toes were ridiculous and exasperating. There was no shaping
of breasts, stomach, knees and ankles. There was nothing in this image
of clay to show the loving caress of the Creator's hand. It had been
modelled by a wretched bungler in a moment of inattention.

Yet it stood there, erect and challenging, this miserable human
tadpole, usurping the throne of Lais and crowned with the worship of
such devotees as Patterson and Wigram.

Are all women ugly? The query flashed through Geoffrey's brain. Is
the vision of Aphrodite Anadyomene an artist's lie? Then he thought of
Asako. Stripped of her gauzy nightdresses, was she like this? A shame
on such imagining!

Patterson was hugging a girl on his knee. Wigram had caught hold of
another. Geoffrey said--but nobody heard him,--

"It's getting too hot for me here. I'm going."

So he went.

His little wife was awake, and disposed to be tearful.

"Where have you been?" she asked, "You said you would only be half an
hour."

"I met Wigram," said Geoffrey, "and I went with him to see some
_geisha_ dancing."

"You might have taken me. Was it very pretty?"

"No, it was very ugly; you would not have cared for it at all."

He had a hot bath, before he lay down by her side.

CHAPTER VI

ACROSS JAPAN

_Momo-shiki no
Omiya-bito wa
Okaredo
Kokoro ni norite
Omoyuru imo!_

Though the people of the
Great City
With its hundred towers
Be many,
Riding on my heart--
(Only) my beloved Sister!

The traveller in Japan is restricted to a hard-worn road, dictated to
him by Messrs. Thos. Cook and Son, and by the Tourists' Information
Bureau. This _via sacra_ is marked by European-style hotels of varying
quality, by insidious curio-shops, and by native guides, serious and
profane, who classify foreigners under the two headings of Temples and
Tea-houses. The lo