"Not at official dinners, I assure you," interposed the Baroness' sister with a shrug. "It means the bottom of the table, and sitting next below the same student-interpreter nine times in the season. I have discovered that I rank with, but not above, the dentist."
"You tempt me to enter the service—in the lowest grade," said Ware, and the Baroness laughed and shook her fan at him reprovingly.
The sky above their heads was pricked out with pale stars, like cat's-eye pins in a greenish-violet tapestry. Up and down the roadway went shimmering rick'sha, and Japanese couples in light kimono strolled along the bay's edge, under the bent pines, their low voices mingled with the soft lapping of the tide. Now and then a bicycle would pass swiftly, bare sandaled feet chasing its pedals, and kimono sleeves flapping like great bats'-wings from its handle-bars; or a flanneled English figure would stride along, with pipe and racquet, from late tennis at the recreation-ground. From the corner came the cries of romping children and the tapping staff and double flute-note of a blind masseur.
The talk flew briskly hither and thither, skimming the froth of the capital's causerie: recent additions to the official set, the splendid new ball-room at the German Embassy, and the increasing importance of Tokyo as a diplomatic center—the coming Imperial "Cherry-Viewing Garden-Party," and the annual Palace duck-hunt at the Shin-Hama preserve, where the game is caught, like butterflies, in scoop-nets—the new ceremonial for Imperial audiences—whether a stabbing affray between two Legation bettos would end fatally, and whether the Turkish Minister's gold dinner service was solid—and a little scandalous surmise regarding the newest continental widow whose stay in Japan had been long and her dinners anything but exclusive—a rumored engagement, and—at last!—the arrival of the new beauty at the American Embassy.
"A real one!" commented Voynich, screwing his eye-glass in more tightly. "And that means something in the tourist season."
Ware's fingers flattened on the stem of his glass of yellow chartreuse as the artist said: "We are in the throes of a new sensation at present, Mr. Ware; a case of love at first sight. It's really a lot rarer than the novelists make out, you know! We are all tremendously interested."
"But he knows her," said Voynich. "The other evening in Tokyo, Mr. Ware, Miss Fairfax mentioned having met you. She is from Virginia, I think."
Ware bowed. "She is very good to remember me," he said. "And so Miss Fairfax has met her fate in Japan?"
"Well, rather!" said the artist. "I hear betting is even that she'll accept him inside a fortnight."
Ware sipped his liqueur with a tinge of relief. Evidently the world of Tokyo had not yet discovered that the new arrival's first name was that of his yacht.