not having worn a
starched shirt for twenty years. In fact, he looked upon white shirts as
a proof of the greater facility of life in the East, where they don't
wear white shirts, than the ease of life in the West, where they do.
"Think for a moment," he says in one of his essays, "how important an
article of occidental attire is the single costly item of white shirts!
Yet even the linen shirt, the so-called 'badge of the gentleman,' is in
itself a useless garment. It gives neither warmth nor comfort. It
represents in our fashion the survival of something, once a luxurious
class distinction, but to-day meaningless and useless as the buttons
sewn on the outside of coat-sleeves."

In spite of the unconventionality of his garments, every one is
unanimous as to Hearn's radiant physical cleanliness, constantly bathing
winter and summer and changing his clothes two or three times a day. His
wife, in her "Reminiscences," mentions his fastidiousness on the subject
of underclothing. Everything was ordered from America, except his
Japanese kimonos and "fudos." He paid high prices, and would have
nothing that was not of the best make and quality.

In later years he was described by an acquaintance in Japan as an odd,
nondescript apparition, with near-sighted eyes, a soft, well-modulated
voice, speaking several languages easily, particularly dainty and clean
in his person, and of considerable personal influence and charm when you
came in contact with him.

CHAPTER XII
THE LADY OF A MYRIAD SOULS

"The lady wore her souls as other women wear their dresses
and change them several times a day; and the multitude of
dresses in the wardrobe of Queen Elizabeth was as nothing to
the multitude of this wonderful person's souls. Sometimes she
was of the South, and her eyes were brown; and again she was
of the North, and her eyes were grey. Sometimes she was of
the thirteenth, and sometimes of the eighteenth century; and
people doubted their own senses when they saw these things
... and the men who most admired her could not presume to
fall in love with her because that would have been absurd.
She had altogether too many souls."

The year 1882 was a memorable one for Lafcadio Hearn; during the course
of that winter the purest and most beneficent feminine influence that he
had hitherto known entered his life, an influence dest