The David Cairns whom Bedient met at the Taku forts, near the mouth of the Pei-ho, had a bit of iron tonic in his veins.  His sentences were shorter, less faltering and more frequent.  He knew things that he had formerly held tentatively.  His conceptions (during night-talks) were called in quickly from the dream-borders, and given the garb and weight of matter.  The stamina of decision had hardened.  He was eager to call Bedient his finest friend, but he had forgotten for the time the amazing subtleties which at first had deepened and broadened this wanderer’s place in his inner life.  A touch of success and the steady drive of ambition had gradually moved the abiding place of Cairns’ consciousness from his heart to his brain.  Few would have detected other than manliness and improvement.  Bedient did not trust himself to think much about it, for fear he would do his friend an injustice.  The fact that he could not see Cairns differently in the latter’s first fame-flush, and observing past doubt, that he was lifted for the world’s eyes, helped Bedient to realize that he was a bit weird in judgment.  At all events, something was gone from the friendship.  He was sore at heart, more than ever alone....  The two separated a second time in Peking after the relief of the Legations.  Bedient went to Japan, where he made the acquaintance of an old Buddhist priest—­a scabby, long-nailed Zarathustra who roamed the boxwood hills above Nikko, and meditated.

Bedient was farther from such things now, but he could not avoid noting that Japan is an old and easy shoe for the passions.  The women of Japan are but finished children, preserving a sense of innocence in their bestowals.  Many little Adelaides in fragrance, without will, without high hopes, only momentary and baby hopes—­children happy in the little happinesses they give and take.  This is the extraordinary feature of an empire of dangerous half-grown men.  Moreover, above the delicate charm of sex, these little creatures are so remote and primitive in race and idea, so intrinsically foreign and undeveloped—­that one leaves the fairest with a mitigated pang...

Bedient never repeated an action which once had brought home to him the sense of his own evil.  The emotions here narrated are but moments in years.  He accounted them quite as legitimate in the abstract as the strange visionings of his higher life, as yet untold.  These latter have to do with his maturity, as wars and passions have to do with the approach to maturity in the life of men.  To Bedient, evil concerned itself with the unclean.  Wherever uncleanness (to him a pure destructive principle) revealed itself there was a balance of power in his nature which turned him from it, despite any concomitant attraction.  The original Adelaide was a superb answer to the more earthy of his three natures; so utterly confined to her one plane as to be innocent of others.  In the two Manila twilights which saw the dominance of his physical being, it was the Adelaide element which roused; and the scars they left behind marked the scorch of memories.