Geoffrey began to be ashamed of his ignorance concerning his wife’s native country.  Somebody had asked him, what exactly bushido was.  He had answered at random that it was made of rice and curry powder.  By the hilarious reception given to this explanation he knew that he must have made a gaffe.  So he asked one of the more erudite bores to give him the names of the best books about Japan.  He would “mug it up,” and get some answers off pat to the leading questions.  The erudite one promptly lent him some volumes by Lafcadio Hearn and Pierre Loti’s Madame Chrysantheme.  He read the novel first of all.  Rather spicy, wasn’t it?

Asako found the book.  It was an illustrated edition; and the little drawings of Japanese scenes pleased her immensely, so that she began to read the letter press.

“It is the story of a bad man and a bad woman,” she said; “Geoffrey, why do you read bad things?  They bring bad conditions.”

Geoffrey smiled.  He was wondering whether the company of the fictitious Chrysantheme was more demoralizing than that of the actual Mme. Laroche Meyerbeer, with whom his wife had been that day for a picnic lunch.

“Besides, it isn’t fair,” his wife continued.  “People read that book and then they think that all Japanese girls are bad like that.”

“Why, darling, I didn’t think you had read it,” Geoffrey expostulated, “who has been telling you about it?”

“The Vicomte de Brie,” Asako answered.  “He called me Chrysantheme and I asked him why.”

“Oh, did he?” said Geoffrey.  Really it was time to put an end to lunch picnics and mermaidism.  But Asako was so happy and so shiningly innocent.

She returned to her circle of admirers, and Geoffrey to his studies of the Far East.  He read the Lafcadio Hearn books, and did not perceive that he was taking opium.  The wonderful sentences of that master of prose poetry rise before the eyes in whorls of narcotic smoke.  They lull the brain as in a dream, and form themselves gradually into visions of a land more beautiful than any land that has ever existed anywhere, a country of vivid rice plains and sudden hills, of gracious forests and red temple gateways, of wise priests and folk-lore imagery, of a simple-hearted smiling people with children bright as flowers laughing and playing in unfailing sunlight, a country where everything is kind, gentle, small, neat, artistic, and spotlessly clean, where men become gods not by sudden apotheosis but by the easy processes of nature, a country, in short, which is the reverse of our own poor vexed continent where the monstrous and the hideous multiply daily.

One afternoon Geoffrey was lounging on the terrace of the hotel reading Kokoro, when his attention was attracted by the arrival of Mme. Laroche Meyerbeer’s motor-car with Asako, her hostess and another woman embedded in its depths.  Asako was the first to leap out.  She went up to her apartment without looking to right or left, and before her husband had time to reach her.  Mme. Meyerbeer watched this arrow flight and shrugged her shoulders before lazily alighting.