in Japan," said Reggie. "Nobody ever knows
exactly when anything is going to happen; and so the Japanese just
wait and wait. They seem to like it rather. Anyhow they don't get
impatient. Life is so uneventful here that I think they must like
prolonging an incident as much as possible, like sucking a sweet
slowly."

Meanwhile there was plenty to look at. Asako could not get over her
shock at the sea of wicked faces which surged below.

"What class of people are these?" Geoffrey asked.

"Oh, shop-people, I think, most of them," said Yae, "and people who
work in factories."

"Good class Japanese don't come here, then?" Geoffrey asked again.

"Oh no, only low class people and students. Japanese people say it is
a shameful thing to go to the Yoshiwara. And, if they go, they go very
secretly."

"Do you know any one who goes?" asked Reggie, with a directness which
shocked his friend's sense of Good Form.

"Oh, my brothers," said Yae, "but they go everywhere; or they say they
do."

* * * * *

It certainly was an ill-favoured crowd. The Japanese are not an ugly
race. The young aristocrat who has grown up with fresh air and healthy
exercise is often good-looking, and sometimes distinguished and
refined. But the lower classes, those who keep company with poverty,
dirt and pawnshops, with the pleasures of the _sake_ barrel and the
Yoshiwara, are the ugliest beings that were ever created in the image
of their misshapen gods. Their small stature and ape-like attitudes,
the colour and discolour of their skin, the flat Mongolian nose, their
gaping mouths and bad teeth, the coarse fibre of their lustreless
black hair, give them an elvish and a goblin look, as though
this country were a nursery for fairy changelings, a land of the
Nibelungen, where bad thoughts have found their incarnation. Yet the
faces have not got that character for good and evil as we find them
among the Aryan peoples, the deep lines and the firm profiles.

"It is the absence of something rather than its presence which appals
and depresses us," Reggie Forsyth observed, "an absence of happiness
perhaps, or of a promise of happiness."

The crowd which filled the four roads with its slow grey tide was
peaceable enough; and it was strangely silent. The drag and clatter
of the clogs made more sound than the human voices. The great majority
were men, though there were women among them, quiet and demure. If
ever a voice was lift