Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 28, 2025
Two threatening gods stood sentinel on either hand. Under the influence of the moonlight the carved figures seemed to move. Yaé led her big companion along a broad-flagged path between a pollarded avenue. Geoffrey still did not know what they had come so far to see. Nor did he care. Everything was so dreamy and so sweet.
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.
Here a table and chairs were set for them in the embrasure of a bow-window, which, protruding over the cross-roads, commanded an admirable view of the converging streets. "The procession won't be here for two hours more," said Yaé, pouting her displeasure. "One always has to wait in Japan," said Reggie.
Then he heard the story of the duel fought for Yaé Smith by two young English officers, both of them her lovers, so people said, and the vaguer tale of a fiancé's suicide. Some weeks later, he met her for the first time at a dance. She was the only woman present in Japanese dress, and Reggie thought at once of Asako Barrington. How wise of these small women to wear the kimono which drapes so gracefully their stumpy figures. He danced with her, his right hand lodged somewhere in the folds of the huge bow with the embroidered peacock, which covered her back. Under this stiff brocade he could feel no sensation of a living body. She seemed to have no bones in her, and she was as light as a feather. It was then that he imagined her as Lilith, the snake-girl. She danced with ease, so much better than he, that at the end of a series of cannons she suggested that they might sit out the dance. She guided him into the garden, and they took possession of a rustic seat. In the ballroom she had seemed timid, and had spoken in undertones only; but in this shadowy tête-
"There's no tune in that last one; you can't whistle it," said Geoffrey, who exaggerated his Philistinism to throw Reggie's artistic nature into stronger relief. "But what has that got to do with the lady?" "Her name is Smith," said Reggie. "I know it is almost impossible and terribly sad; but her other name is Yaé. Rather wild and savage isn't it?
It was just the kind of meeting which would exasperate and unnerve him. Her appearance was against her. She wore a Japanese kimono, unpleasantly reminiscent of Yaé. Her hair was disordered and frantic-looking. Her eyes were red with weeping. "Let me say at once," observed Reggie, as he offered her a chair, "that I am in no way responsible for your husband's shortcomings.
This Yoshiwara question was to him something more than a moral conundrum. It was a subtle attack by the wife of his bosom, aided and abetted by his old friend Reggie Forsyth and by the mysterious forces of this unfamiliar land as typified by Yaé Smith, against the citadel of Good Form, against the stronghold of his principles. Geoffrey himself wished to see the Yoshiwara.
He had transferred to her precocious mind his love of excitement, his inquisitiveness, his courage and his lack of scruple; and then, when she was sixteen, he had died, leaving as his last command to the Japanese wife who would obey him in death as she had obeyed him living, the strict injunction that Yaé was to have her own way always and in everything.
"Oh, do, Miss Aline!" pleaded Patsy, "that will be the very happiest thing I can think of." "Bide a wee," said the old lady, motioning Patsy to be silent. "I am heartily obligated to your Highness for her maist kind offer, and I will accept it on yae condeetion.
Patsy clung to the old man's sturdy arm, and certainly Kennedy's bachelor heart beat the kindlier, if not the faster, for the pressure. He was a most reassuring confidant and never took a hopeless view of anything. "There's more ways o' killing a cat than choking her wi' cream!" he was in the habit of saying. "The craw doesna bigg his nest wi' yae strae!"
Word Of The Day
Others Looking