n," she said; "Geoffrey,
why do you read bad things? They bring bad conditions."

Geoffrey smiled. He was wondering whether the company of the
fictitious _Chrysantheme_ was more demoralizing than that of the
actual Mme. Laroche Meyerbeer, with whom his wife had been that day
for a picnic lunch.

"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 _Chrysantheme_
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 Cythere_, "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