er them, thanks to her beauty, her personality
and, above all, to her money. Baroness Miyazaki saw at once that
she had a rival in Eurasia. She hated her, but waited calmly for the
opportunity to assist in her inevitable collapse, a woman of wide
experience watching the antics of a girl innocent and giddy, the
Baroness playing the part of Elizabeth of England to Yae's Mary Queen
of Scots.

Meanwhile, Yae was learning what the Eurasian girls were whispering
about so continually--love affairs, intrigues with secretaries of
South American legations, secret engagements, disguised messages.

This seed fell upon soil well-prepared. Her father had been a
reprobate till the day of his death, when he had sent for his
favourite Japanese girl to come and massage the pain out of his wasted
body. Her brothers had one staple topic of conversation which they
did not hesitate to discuss before their sister--_geisha_, assignation
houses, and the licensed quarters. Yae's mind was formed to the idea
that for grown-up people there is one absorbing distraction, which is
to be found in the company of the opposite sex.

There was no talk in the Smith's home of the romance of marriage,
of the love of parents and children, which might have turned this
precocious preoccupation in a healthy direction. The talk was of women
all the time, of women as instruments of pleasure. Nor could Mrs.
Smith, the Japanese mother, guide her daughter's steps. She was a
creature of duty, dry-featured and self-effaced. She did her utmost
for her children's physical wants, she nursed them devotedly in
sickness, she attended to their clothes and to their comforts. But she
did not attempt to influence their moral ideas. She had given up any
hope of understanding her husband. She schooled herself to accept
everything without surprise. Poor man! He was a foreigner and had
a fox (i.e. he was possessed); and unfortunately his children had
inherited this incorrigible animal.

To please her daughter she opened up her house for hospitality with
unseemly promptitude after her husband's death. The Smiths gave
frequent dances, well-attended by young people of the Tokyo foreign
community. At the first of these series, Yae listened to the
passionate pleadings of a young man called Hoskin, a clerk in an
English firm. On the second opportunity she became engaged to him. On
the third, she was struck with admiration and awe by a South American
diplomat with the green ribbon of a