Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III THE LAND OF THE GODS IN the first touch of the shore, where the Ambassador's pretty daughter waited, Barbara's problem had been swept away. Patricia had rushed to meet her, embraced her, with a moist, ecstatic kiss on her cheek, rescued the bishop from his ordeal of hand-shaking and carried him off to find their trunks, leaving Barbara borne down by a Babel of sound and scent whose newness made her breathless, and to whose manifold sensations she was as keenly alive as a photographic plate to color. A half-dozen gnarled, unshaven porters in excessively shabby jackets and straw sandals carried her hand-baggage into the hideously modern, red-brick custom-house, over whose entrance a huge golden conventionalized chrysanthemum shone in the sunlight, and as she watched them, a dapper youth in European dress, with a shining brown derby, a bright purple neck-tie, a silver-mounted cane and teeth eloquent of gold bridge-work, slid into her hand a card whose type proclaimed that Mr. Y. Nakajima "did the guiding for foreign ladies and gentlemans." The air was fragrant with the mildaroma from tiny Japanese pipes and a-flutter with moving fans. A group of elderly men in hot frock- coats and tiles of not too modern vintage were welcoming a returning official, and sedate gentlemen in sad-colored houri and spotless cleft foot-wear, bowed double in stately ceremonial, with the suck- ing-in of breath which in the old-fashioned Japanese etiquette means "respectful awe bordering on terror." Barbara had found herself singularly conscious of a feeling of universal good-nature. It came to her even in the posture of the resting coolies, stretched at the side of the quay, lazily sunning themselves, with whiffs of the omnipresent little pipe, and in the faces of the bare-legged rick'sh...