On the beach they found him in a blue bathing-costume sitting under an enormous paper umbrella with Miss Smith and the gipsy half-caste girl. Yaé wore a cotton kimono of blue and white, and she looked like a figurine from a Nanking vase.
"Geoffrey," said the young diplomat, "come into the sea at once. You look thoroughly dirty. Do you like sea-bathing, Mrs. Harrington?"
"I have only paddled," said Asako, "when I was a little girl."
Geoffrey could not resist the temptation of the blue water and the lazy curling waves. In a few minutes the two men were walking down to the sea's edge, Geoffrey laughing at Reggie's chatter. His arms were akimbo, with hands on the hips, hips which looked like the boles of a mighty oak-tree. He touched the ground with the elasticity of Mercury; he pushed through the air with the shoulders of Hercules. The line of his back was pliant as a steel blade. In his hair the sun's reflection shone like wires of gold. The Gods were come down in the semblance of men.
Yaé did not repress a sharp intake of her breath; and she squeezed the hand of the gipsy girl as if pain had gripped her.
"How big your husband is!" she said to Asako. "What a splendid man!"
Asako thought of her husband as "dear old Geoffrey." She never criticized his points; nor did she think that Yaé's admiration was in very good taste. However, she accepted it as a clumsy compliment from an uneducated girl who knew no better. The gipsy companion watched with a peculiar smile. She understood the range of Yaé's admiration.
"Isn't it a pity they have to wear bathing dress?" Miss Smith went on. "It's so ugly. Look at the Japanese."
Farther along the beach some Japanese men were bathing. They threw their clothes down on the sand and ran into the water with nothing on their bodies except a strip of white cotton knotted round the loins. They dashed into the sea with their arms lifted above their head, shouting wildly like savage devotees calling upon their gods. The sea sparkled like silver round their tawny skin. Their torsos were well formed and hardy; their dwarfed and ill-shaped legs were hidden by the waves. Certainly they presented an artistic contrast with the sodden blue of the foreigners' bathing suits. But Asako, brought up to the strict ideals of convent modesty, said: