"It takes a few days to get used to it," said the Ambassador. "And what a beautiful and practical costume it is!"
"And comfortable!" sighed Patricia. "No 'bones' or tight places, and only four or five things to put on. I don't wonder European women look queer to the Japanese. The cook's wife told me the other day that the first foreign lady she ever saw looked to her like a wasp with a wig on like a Shinto devil."
There rose again on the still night air the savage bay Barbara had heard in her room. "I'm afraid I must make up my mind to lose Shiro," the Ambassador said regretfully. "He's a Siberian wolf-hound that a friend sent me from Moscow. But the climate doesn't agree with him, apparently. For the last two days he's seemed really unsafe. There's a famous Japanese dog-doctor in this section, but he's been sick himself and I haven't liked to go to an ordinary native 'vet.' But I shall have him looked at to-morrow."
"I do hope you will," said Mrs. Dandridge nervously. "He almost killed Patsy's Pomeranian the first day he came. Watanabé says he hasn't touched his food to-day, and we can't take any risks with so many children in the compound. We have forty-seven, Barbara," she continued, "counting the stablemen's families, and some of them are the dearest mites! Every Christmas we give them a tree. It makes one feel tremendously patriarchal!"
It was a home-like meal, albeit thin slices of lotos-stem floated in Barbara's soup, the lobster had no claws, and the entrée was baked bamboo. Save for a high, four-paneled screen of gold-leaf with delicate etchings of snow-clad pines, the white room was without ornament, but the table gleamed with old silver, and in its center was a great bowl of pink azaleas. Smooth-faced Japanese men-servants came and went noiselessly in snowy footwear and dark silk houri whose sleeves bore the Embassy eagle in silver thread.
The Ambassador was a man of keen observation, and a cheerful philosophy. His theory of life was expressed in a saying of his: "Human-kind is about the same as it has always been, except a good deal kinder." He had learned the country at first hand. He had a profound appreciation of its whole historical background, one gained not merely from libraries, but from deeper study of the essential qualities of Japanese character and feeling. He had the perfect gift, moreover, of the raconteur, and he held Barbara passionately attentive as he sketched, in bold outlines, the huge picture of Japanese modernization. Yet light as was his touch, he nevertheless made her see beneath the veneer of the foreign, the unaltering ego of a civilization old and austere, of unfamiliar, strenuous ideals, with cast steel conventions, eternal mysteries of character and of racial destiny.
Coffee was served in the small drawing-room—a home-like, soft-toned room of crystal-paned bookcases, and furniture that had been handed down in the Dandridge family from candle-lighted colony days.
"It seems a shame," said Mrs. Dandridge, "that this evening has to be broken, but Patsy and I must look in at the Charity Bazaar. I'm sure you won't mind, Barbara, if we leave you alone now for an hour or so. It's a new idea: every lady is to bring something she has no further use for, but which is too good to throw away."
"I presume," observed the Ambassador innocently, "that some of them will bring their husbands."
"Ned," said Mrs. Dandridge, as she drew on her wrap, "people will soon think you haven't a serious side. It would serve you right if I took you along as my contribution."