and, at all times and places, the glory of England and the superiority of English blood.
This evening he was dismissing, with a torrent of apparently precise ethnological and historical data, the recent Japanese pretension to Aryan origin—doubtless for the benefit of that little Japanese commercial agent with bad teeth who sat in the corner opposite me working out problems on a go-board. The usual group of weak-minded persons were sitting about Sir Robert's table, listening with the usual awe.
Now, I rather like that Japanese. Only this morning he was so kind as to sing several examples of the folk-song of his country into my phonograph. Five records he gave me, so that my work is begun even before we land. Excellent specimens, two of them, of the Oriental tone sense, with observably different intervals for the ascending and descending scales.
He exhibited no sign that Sir Robert's talk annoyed him; quietly went on placing the little black and white shells on the board. (It is interesting to note, at this point, that the Japanese handle small objects with the first three fingers only, without employing the thumb as we do.) But I felt myself becoming angry. My forehead grew hot and flushed, as it always does when I am stirred. I tried to calm myself by constructing a house of dominoes; but the pitching of the ship overturned it.
Still that throaty voice. “Thank God,” I thought, “in another day we shall be at Yokohama!”
I tried to read a four-weeks-old copy of the Illustrated London News. No use; the voice held me.
It occurred to me, as an exercise in self-control, to interest myself in speculating on the emotions and the characteristics back of the faces here in the smoking-room. I achieved some success at this exercise. Why, when you come to think of it, should each particular unit in this haphazard assemblage of men and women be journeying away off here to the other side of the earth? There are surely dramas in our little company. The two middle-aged ladies with the firm chins, for instance, who dress so quietly and speak so discreetly—it is whispered among the men that they are high and prosperous in a sad business on Soo-chow Road, Shanghai. And the young German adventurer with the scars across his nose, who borrowed fifteen
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