Baroness Miyazaki is a stupendous old lady, whose figure might be drawn from some eighteenth-century comedy. Her late husband--and gossip says that she was his landlady during a period of study in England--held a high position in the Imperial Court. His wife, by a pomposity of manner and an assumption of superior knowledge, succeeded, where no other white woman has succeeded, in acquiring the respect and intimacy of the great ladies of Japan. She has inculcated the accents of Pentonville, with its aitches dropped and recovered again, among the high Japanese aristocracy.
But first her husband died; and then the old Imperial Court of the Emperor Meiji passed away. So Baroness Miyazaki had to retire from the society of princesses. She passed not without dignity, like an old monarch _en disponibilité_, to the vacant throne of the Eurasian limbo, where her rule is undisputed.
Every Friday afternoon you may see her presiding over her little court in the Miyazaki mansion, with its mixture of tinsel and dust. The Bourbonian features, the lofty white wig, the elephantine form, the rustling taffeta, and the ebony stick with its ivory handle, leads one's thoughts backwards to the days of Richardson and Sterne.
But her loyal subjects who surround her--it is impossible to place them. They are poor, they are untidy, they are restless. Their black hair is straggling, their brown eyes are soft, their clothes are desperately European, but ill-fitting and tired. They chatter together ceaselessly and rapidly like starlings, with curious inflections in their English speech, and phrases snatched up from the vernacular. They are forever glancing and whispering, bursting at times into wild peals of laughter which lack the authentic ring of gladness. They are a people of shadows blown by the harsh winds of destiny across the face of a land where they can find no permanent resting place. They are the children of Eurasia, the unhappiest people on earth.
It was among these people that Yaé's lot was cast. She stepped into an immediate ascendancy over them, thanks to her beauty, her personality and, above all, to her money. Baroness Miyazaki saw at once that she had a rival in Eurasia. She hated her, but waited calmly for the opportunity to assist in her inevitable collapse, a woman of wide experience watching the antics of a girl innocent and giddy, the Baroness playing the part of Elizabeth of England to Yaé's Mary Queen of Scots.