The young diplomat said to his friend:
"Geoffrey, you've not been in the East long enough to be exasperated by it. I have. So our ideas will not be in sympathy."
"It's not what I thought it was going to be, I must admit. Everything is so much of a muchness. If you've seen one temple you've seen the lot, and the same with everything here."
"That is the first stage, Disappointment. We have heard so much of the East and its splendours, the gorgeous East and the rest of it. The reality is small and sordid, and like so much that is ugly in our own country."
"Yes, they wear shocking bad clothes, don't they, directly they get out of kimonos; and even the kimonos look dingy and dirty."
"They are." said Reggie. "Yours would be, if you had to keep a wife and eight children on thirty shillings a month."
Then he added:
"The second stage in the observer's progress is Discovery. Have you read Lafcadio Hearn's books about Japan?"
"Yes. some of them," answered Geoffrey. "It strikes me that he was a thorough-paced liar."
"No, he was a poet, a poet; and he jumped over the first stage to dwell for some time in the second, probably because he was by nature short-sighted. That is a great advantage for discoverers."