Every Friday afternoon you may see her presiding over her little court in the Miyazaki mansion, with its mixture of tinsel and dust. The Bourbonian features, the lofty white wig, the elephantine form, the rustling taffeta, and the ebony stick with its ivory handle, leads one's thoughts backwards to the days of Richardson and Sterne.
But her loyal subjects who surround her—it is impossible to place them. They are poor, they are untidy, they are restless. Their black hair is straggling, their brown eyes are soft, their clothes are desperately European, but ill-fitting and tired. They chatter together ceaselessly and rapidly like starlings, with curious inflections in their English speech, and phrases snatched up from the vernacular. They are forever glancing and whispering, bursting at times into wild peals of laughter which lack the authentic ring of gladness. They are a people of shadows blown by the harsh winds of destiny across the face of a land where they can find no permanent resting place. They are the children of Eurasia, the unhappiest people on earth.
It was among these people that Yaé's lot was cast. She stepped into an immediate ascendancy over them, thanks to her beauty, her personality and, above all, to her money. Baroness Miyazaki saw at once that she had a rival in Eurasia. She hated her, but waited calmly for the opportunity to assist in her inevitable collapse, a woman of wide experience watching the antics of a girl innocent and giddy, the Baroness playing the part of Elizabeth of England to Yaé's Mary Queen of Scots.
Meanwhile, Yaé was learning what the Eurasian girls were whispering about so continually—love affairs, intrigues with secretaries of South American legations, secret engagements, disguised messages.
This seed fell upon soil well-prepared. Her father had been a reprobate till the day of his death, when he had sent for his favourite Japanese girl to come and massage the pain out of his wasted body. Her brothers had one staple topic of conversation which they did not hesitate to discuss before their sister—geisha, assignation houses, and the licensed quarters. Yaé's mind was formed to the idea that for grown-up people there is one absorbing distraction, which is to be found in the company of the opposite sex.
There was no talk in the Smith's home of the romance of marriage, of the love of parents and children, which might have turned this precocious preoccupation in a healthy direction. The talk was of women all the time, of women as instruments of pleasure. Nor could Mrs. Smith, the Japanese mother, guide her daughter's steps. She was a creature of duty, dry-featured and self-effaced. She did her utmost for her children's physical wants, she nursed them devotedly in sickness, she attended to their clothes and to their comforts. But she did not attempt to influence their moral ideas. She had given up any hope of understanding her husband. She schooled herself to accept everything without surprise. Poor man! He was a foreigner and had a fox (i.e. he was possessed); and unfortunately his children had inherited this incorrigible animal.
To please her daughter she opened up her house for hospitality with unseemly promptitude after her husband's death. The Smiths gave frequent dances, well-attended by young people of the Tokyo foreign community. At the first of these series, Yaé listened to the passionate pleadings of a young man called Hoskin, a clerk in an English firm. On the second opportunity she became engaged to him. On the third, she was struck with admiration and awe by a South American diplomat with the green ribbon of a Bolivian order tied across his false shirt front. Don Quebrado d'Acunha was a practiced hand at seduction and Yaé became one of his victims soon after her seventeenth birthday, and just ten days before her admirer sailed away to rejoin his legitimate spouse in Guayaquil. The engagement with Hoskin still lingered on; but the young man, who adored her was haggard and pale. Yaé had a new follower, a teacher of English in a Japanese school, who recited beautifully and wrote poetry about her.
Then Baroness Miyazaki judged that her time was ripe. She summoned young Hoskin into her dowager presence, and, with a manner heavily maternal, she warned him against the lightness of his fiancée. When he refused to believe evil of her she produced a pathetic letter full of half-confessions, which the girl herself had written to her in a moment of expansion. A week later the young man's body was washed ashore near Yokohama.
Yaé was sorry to hear of the accident; but she had long ceased to be interested in Hoskin, the reticence of whose passion had seemed like a touch of ice to her fevered nerves. But this was Baroness Miyazaki's opportunity to discredit Yaé, to crush her rival out of serious competition, and to degrade her to the demi-monde. It was done promptly and ruthlessly; for the Baroness's gossip carried weight throughout the diplomatic, professional and missionary circles, even where her person was held in ridicule. The facts of Hoskin's suicide became known. Nice women dropped Yaé entirely; and bad men ran after her with redoubled zest. Yaé did not realize her ostracism.
The Smith's dances next winter became so many competitions for the daughter's corruption, and were rendered brilliant by the presence of several of the young officers attached to the British Embassy, who made the running, and finally monopolized the prize.