The rest of the party had turned and were looking in that direction. "Why," said Baroness Stroloff, "that's Doctor Bersonin."
One of the young army men looked at her curiously. "Do you know him?" he asked.
"Why, of course. One meets him everywhere. I saw him at a dinner last week. Have you met him?"
"Oh, yes, we're supposed to know everybody," he said carelessly. His tone, however, held something which made her say:
"Most men don't like him, I find. I wonder why."
"Why don't people like lizards?" said Patsy. "Because they're cold and clammy and wicked-looking."
"They like them enough to eat them in Senagambia," said the young officer smiling. "Bersonin is a great man, no doubt, but there's something about him—I met a man once who had run across him in South America and—he was prejudiced. Who's the young fellow with him, Daunt?"
"His name is Ware—Philip Ware," was the answer. "I knew him at college."
Barbara felt the blood staining her cheeks. So that was "Phil," the brother of whom Austen Ware had told her! The name called up thoughts that had obtruded themselves in the moment she saw the white yacht lying at anchor, and which since then she had wilfully thrust from her mind. Her gaze studied the handsome, youthful form, noting the bold, restless glance, the dissipated lines of the comely face, with a sudden distaste. A twang from the orchestra recalled her, as the curtain was looped back for the Miyako Odori, the "Dance of the Capital."
It was Barbara's introduction to a native orchestra and at first its strummings and squealings, its lack of modes and of harmony, its odd barbaric phrasing, infected her with a mad desire to laugh. But gradually there came to her the hint of under-rhythm—as when she had listened to Haru's samisen in the garden—and with it an overpowering sense of suggestion. It was the remote cry of occult passions, a twittering of ghostly shadows, the wailing of an oriental Sphynx whom Time had abandoned to the eternal desert. It had in it melancholy and the enigma of the ages. It wiped away the ugly modern European buildings, the western costumes, the gloze of borrowed method, and left Barbara looking into the naked heart of the East, old, intent, and full of mystical meaning.