She tipped her little saffron face up to him and smiled. He could not resist her, although he knew that there was no séance, that she was going to meet another lover, and taking her small, lovely hand, he kissed the lacquered fingertips. As she stepped into the full light, she seemed unreal, less human than animal material fashioned in the image of figures of painting and sculpture and the ladies of poetry so that it was almost necessary to understand the ideal in Oriental art before one could truly appreciate how authentic her beauty was. I would say of my mother’s lips that they had the color of a rose, but of Kakosan I would have to say that her mouth was like a “mallow flower” for her loveliness was something so unfamiliar that the old words and metaphors would not do, and to say her lips were like a rose would be to say that they were beautiful but not to specify them as Oriental. She wore, under her incongruous American polo-coat, a dress of purple silk brocaded with gold. In the glowing blackness of her hair was pinned a white carnation, and on either hand she wore a jade ring. She was, with this costume, with her symmetrical, unblemished face, her tiny body as limber as a grass, something so conscious, so tastefully assembled that she was like a bejeweled ornament of incalculable worth. It was hard to imagine her in the arms of an Occidental man, harder still to imagine her as promiscuous as Nathan had implied she was and as I had gathered from her unskillful lie about the séance.