"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 Chrysanthème 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.
"Is all well?" asked Geoffrey.
"No serious damage," smiled the lady, who is known in Deauville as Madame Cythère, "but you had better go and console her. I think she has seen the devil for the first time."
He opened the door of their sunny bedroom, and found Asako packing feverishly, and sobbing in spasms.
"My poor little darling," he said, lifting her in his arms, "whatever is the matter?"