a
squaw's man? A sickening vision of _chonkina_ at Nagasaki rose before
his imagination.

When dinner was over, and after Asako had received the congratulations
of the other guests, she retired upstairs to put on her _neglige_.
Geoffrey liked a cigar after dinner, but Asako objected to the heavy
aroma hanging about her bedroom. They therefore parted generally for
this brief half hour; and afterwards they would read and talk together
in their sitting-room. Like other people, they soon got into the
habit of going to bed early in a country where there were no theatres
playing in a comprehensible tongue, and no supper restaurants to turn
night into day.

Geoffrey lit his cigar and made his way to the smoking-room. Two
elderly men, merchants from Kobe, were already sitting there over
whiskies and sodas, discussing a mutual acquaintance.

"No, I don't see much of him," one of them, an American, was saying,
"nobody does nowadays. But take my word, when he came out here as a
young man he was one of the smartest young fellows in the East."

"Yes, I can quite believe you," said the other, a stolid Englishman
with a briar pipe, "he struck me as an exceptionally well-educated
man."

"He was more than that, I tell you. He was a financial genius. He was
a man with a great future."

"Poor fellow!" said the other. "Well, he has only got himself to
thank."

Geoffrey was not an eavesdropper by nature, but he found himself
getting interested in the fate of this anonymous failure, and wondered
if he was going to hear the cause of the man's downfall.

"When these Japanese women get hold of a man," the American went on,
"they seem to drain the brightness out of him. Why, you have only got
to stroll around to the Kobe Club and look at the faces. You can
tell the ones that have Japanese wives or housekeepers right away.
Something seems to have gone right out of their expression."

"It's worry," said the Englishman. "A fellow marries a Japanese girl,
and he finds he has to keep all her lazy relatives as well; and then a
crowd of half-caste brats come along, and he doesn't know whether they
are his own or not."

"It is more than that," was the emphatic answer. "Men with white wives
have worry enough; and a man can go gay in the tea-houses, and none
the worse. But when once they marry them it is like signing a bond
with the devil. That man's damned."

Geoffrey rose and left the room. He thought on the whole it was better
to withdr