The Duke of Dorset had gone to tea on the American yacht. It was a thing which he had not intended to do when he came to Oban. The general conception of that nation current on the Continent of Europe had not impressed him with the excellence of its people. The United States of America was thought to be a sort of Spanish Main, full of adventurers, where no one of the old, sure, established laws of civilization ran. A sort of "house of refuge" for the revolutionary middle class of the world—the valet who would be a gentleman, the maid who would he a lady. It was a country of pretenders, posers, actors. Those who came out of it with their vast, incredible fortunes were, after all, only rich shopkeepers. They were clever, unusually clever, but they were masqueraders.

But, somehow, he could not attach either the one or the other of these two persons to this conception of the United States of America.

He did not stop to consider whether this curious old man, whose face, whose body, whose big, dominant manner recalled in suggestion those stone figures covered with vines forgotten in Asia, was a mere powerful bourgeois, grown rich by some idiosyncrasy of chance, a mere trader taking over with a large hand the avenues of commerce, a mere, big tropical product of a country, in wealth-producing resources itself big and tropical; or one of another order who had drawn this nation of middle class exiles under him, as in romances some hardy marquis had made himself the king of outlaws.

Nor did he stop to consider whether this girl was a new order of woman evolved out of the exquisite blend of some choice alien bloods.

The thing that moved him was the dominion of that mood already on him when the Marchesa Soderrelli came so opportunely through the shop door.

Let us explain that sensation as we like. One of those innumerable hypnotic suggestions of Nature drawing us to her purpose, or a trick of the mind, or some vagrant memory antedating the experiences of life. The answer is to seek. The philosopher of Dantzic was of the first opinion, our universities of the second, and the ancients of the third. One may stand as he pleases in this distinguished company. Certain it is, that, when human reason was in its clearest luster, old, wise men, desperately set on getting at the truth, were of the opinion that some shadowy memories entered with us through the door of life.

Caroline Childers poured the tea and the Duke of Dorset sat with his eyes on her. He seemed to see before him in this girl two qualities which he had not believed it possible to combine: The first delicate sheen of things newly created, as, for instance, the first blossom of the wild brier, that falls to pieces under the human hand, and an experience of life. This young girl, who, at such an age in any drawingroom of Europe, would be merely a white fragment in a corner, was here easily and without concern taking the first place. The little party was, in a sense, a thing of fragments.

Cyrus Childers was talking. The Duke was watching the young girl, and replying when he must. The Marchesa Soderrelli sat with her hands idly in her lap and her eyes narrowed, looking out at something in the harbor.

It was an afternoon slipped somehow through the door of heaven. The sea dimpled under a sheet of sun. The bay was covered with every manner of craft, streaming with pennants, yachts from every country of Europe in gala trimmings. It was as though the world had met here for a festival. Crews from rival yacht clubs were rowing. The bay was full of music, laughter, color, if one looked straight out toward Loch Lynne, but, if off toward the open water, following the Marchesa's eyes, he saw on the edge of all this music, these lights, this color, this swimming fÊte, the gray looming bulk of a warship, with her long, lean steel back, and her dingy turrets, lying low in the sea, as though she had this moment emerged from the blue water—as though she were some deep-sea monster come up unnoticed on the border of this festival.

The Marchesa interrupted the conversation.

"Do you know what that reminds me of?" she said, indicating the warship. "It reminds me of the silent Iroquois that used always to attend the Puritan May Days."

Cyrus Childers replied in his big voice.

"Are you seeing the yellow peril, Marchesa?" he said.

"I don't like it," she replied. "It seems out of place. Every other nation that we know is here, dancing in its ribbons around the May pole, and there stands the silent Iroquois in his war paint."

"Perhaps," said Caroline Childers, "the little brown man came in the only clothes he had."

"I think Miss Childers has it right," said the Duke of Dorset. "I think the brown man came in the only clothes he had, and he has possessed these clothes only for a fortnight."

"Is it a new cruiser, then?" said Mr. Childers.

"It was built on the Clyde for Chile, I think," replied the Duke, "and the Japanese Government bought it on the day it was launched."

"How like the Oriental," said the Marchesa, "to keep the purchase a secret until the very day the warship went into the sea. Other nations build their ships in the open; this one in the dark. She pretends to be poor; she shows us her threadbare coat; she takes our ministers to look into her empty treasury, but she buys a warship. How true it is that the Anglo-Saxon never knows what is in the 'back' of the oriental mind."

"Perhaps," said Caroline Childers, "we are quite as puzzling to the Oriental."

"That is the very point of it," replied the Marchesa. "They do not understand each other and they never will. They are oil and water; they will not mix. They can only be friends in make-believe, and therefore they must be enemies in reality. Why do we deceive ourselves? In the end the world must be either white, or it must be yellow."

"Such a conclusion," said the Duke of Dorset, "seems to me to be quite wrong. Certain portions of the earth are adapted to certain races. Why should not these races retain them, and when they have approached a standard of civilization, why should they not be admitted into the confederacy of nations?"

"I do not know a doctrine," replied the Mar-chesa, "more remote from the colonial policy of England."

"Do you always quite understand England?" said the Duke. "Here, for instance, is a new and enlightened nation, arising in the East. We do not set ourselves to beat it down and possess its islands. We welcome it; we open the door to it."

"And it will enter and possess the house," said the Marchesa. "What the white man is now doing with his hand open, he must, later on, undo with his hand closed. Look already how arrogant this oriental nation has become since she has got England at her back. It was a master play, this alliance. The white man had all but possessed the world when this wily Oriental slipped in and divided the two great English-speaking people. He was not misled by any such sophistry as a brotherhood of nations. He knew that one or the other of the two races must dominate, must exterminate the other. He could not attack the white man's camp unless he could first divide it. Now, he has got it divided, and he is getting ready to attack. Can one doubt the menace to the United States?"

Cyrus Childers laughed. "Oh," he said, "the United States is in no danger. Japan is not going to try a war with us. It is all oriental bravado."

"But he is creeping in on the Pacific Coast already," said the Marchesa. "He is getting a footing; he is establishing a base; he is planting a colony to rise when he requires it; so that when he makes his great move to thrust the white man's frontier from the coast back into the desert, there will already be Japanese colonies planted on the soil. You have, yourself, told me that they are always arriving and spreading themselves imperceptibly along the coast."

"My dear Marchesa," said Mr. Childers, "the little Japanese is only looking for employment. He has none of your big designs. His instincts are all those of the servant." He looked at the Duke of Dorset. "If Japan," he continued, "wishes to extend her territory, she will wish to extend it in that part of the world which the Oriental now inhabits. If there is really any menace, my dear Marchesa, it is a menace to England, and not to us. If Japan had a great design to dominate the world, would she not undertake to weld all the oriental races into a nation of which she would be the head? Would she not go about it as Bismarck went about the creation of Germany? That, it seems to me, would be the only feasible plan for such an enterprise."

"And do you think for a moment," said the Marchesa, "that she has not this very plan?"

"I do not believe that Japan has any such plan," replied the Duke of Dorset.

"And you," said the Marchesa, "who have lived in the East, who have assisted England to make this alliance, do you, who know the Oriental, believe that he does not dream of overrunning the world?"

"Dream!" replied the Duke of Dorset. "Perhaps he dreams. I was speaking of a plan, and a plan means a policy that one may carry out. Japan cannot move in India because there is England in India."

"Not yet," said the Marchesa, "but when she shall have made the white men enemies; when she shall have grown stronger under English friendship. She cannot yet depend on these oriental states. They are still afraid of the white man. She has encouraged them by her victory over Russia, but not enough. She must give them another proof that the yellow race is not the inferior of the white one. If she can crush the white man in North America, the yellow man will rise in Asia. Then the dream becomes a plan; then the plan becomes a reality."

"My dear Marchesa," said Caroline, "you must not so berate the little yellow brother in the house of his friends."

"Different races are never friends," replied the Marchesa. "I know because I am a woman, and have lived among them. The Latin does not like the Teuton, nor either of them the Saxon, and yet, all these are of the Caucasian race. Add to this the inherent physical repugnance which exists between the colored races and the white, and this natural dislike becomes a racial hatred. It is no mere question of inclination; it is an organic antipathy running in the blood. Ministers who draw treaties may not know this, but every woman knows it."

"Then," said Caroline, "there can be no danger to us in England's treaty with Japan."

"And why is there no danger?" said the Marchesa.

"Dear me," said the girl, "if I could only remember how Socrates managed arguments." She took a pose of mock gravity. "I think he would begin like this:

"You hold, Marchesa, that the hatred of one race for another increases with the difference between them?"

"I do," replied the Marchesa.

"Then, Marchesa, you ought also to hold that the love between nations increases as that difference disappears."

"I do hold that, too, Socrates," said the Marchesa.

"Also, Marchesa, it is your opinion that of all races the oriental is least like us?"

"It is."

"And of all races, the Briton is most like us?"

"Yes."

"Then the Jap ought to hate us with all his heart?"

"He ought, Socrates," said the Marchesa. "And," continued the girl, making a little courtesy to the Duke of Dorset, "the Briton ought to love us with all his heart?"

The Marchesa laughed. "I leave the Duke of Dorset to answer for his people."

The Duke put down his cup. "With all our heart," he said.

But the Marchesa was not to be diverted. "I think," she said, "you are sounding deeper waters than you suspect. We know how General Ian Hamilton said he felt when he saw the first white prisoners taken by the Japanese in Manchuria; and we know that Canada has had the same trouble on her Pacific Coast as the United States. This family feeling of the white man for the white man may prove stronger than any state policy." She turned to the Duke of Dorset. "The riots in Vancouver," she said, "are the flying straws."

"Both nations," said the Duke of Dorset, "ought firmly to suppress these outbreaks. Vancouver ought no more to be permitted to jeopardize the policy of England than California or Oregon ought to be permitted to involve the foreign policy of the United States. I am going out to Canada to look a little into this question for myself."

"And you will find," said the Marchesa, "what any woman could tell you, that these outbursts are only the manifestations of a deep-seated racial antipathy; an instinctive resistance of all the English-speaking-people alike to having the frontier of the white man's dominion thrust back by the Asiatic."

Caroline Childers interrupted. "You are a hopeless Jingo, my dear Marchesa," she said. "Let us go and see the regattas."