Tojin-san wandered out into another scene of the past, and out of a longer, darker memory a woman’s cold, unsmiling face mocked him.

“Marry you!” she had cried, and not even her native courtesy could suppress the note of horror in her voice. “Oh—h!” she had cried out, covering her eyes shudderingly, “if you could but—see—yourself!”

The Tojin-san had indeed seen himself that night. Glaring back at him in a tragic grimness his own fearful face had looked at him from the mirror. Not that he had not known the blight upon him; but he had been dull, stupid, slow to realize its full horror.

Time was when the Tojin-san was as other men, smooth-skinned, level-eyed, very good to look upon. But in a God and Man forsaken little town crushed between the mountains and the sea, a young and ardent doctor of long ago had given himself up to a sublime heroism. Shoulder to shoulder with a few—one or two only beside himself—they had fought the plague of smallpox. From this fight the Tojin-san had emerged marked! With the optimism and blindness of youth, however, he had gone back to the woman he loved, and she had struck at him!

There is a Japanese proverb which says: “The tongue three inches long can kill a man six feet tall.” The Tojin-san thought of this now. A woman’s tongue, the mere brutal smiting of her words, had wrought a curious effect upon his entire life. From that time on he had avoided women as he had not a vile plague. He led the life of an ascetic, wrapped in his books and sciences, making few friends, avoiding others, with the sensitive fear upon him that the whole world avoided and shrank also from him. And while still a young man—under forty—they had named him “Old Grind” at the university.

Then upon him suddenly had come a new upheaval, a pent-up, passionate longing to break away from the dull hopeless treadmill to which he seemed bound.

“Old Grind!” So age was to be clapped upon him while the vital fires of youth still throbbed in an agony in his blood. There was a new life, an exhilarating, more inspiring life to be led, out in that old-new world across the seas! It beckoned to those of adventurous souls and those who were weary of a drowsy, torpid existence, wherein hope of a new dawn had vanished beyond memory. The Tojin-san panted for this new life. He wanted to swing his arms in a wilder world, to breathe less vitiated air, to feel himself alive again! He had made of himself, for half a lifetime, a mummy for the sake of a woman he had not even really loved. It was fantastic!

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