THE SAMURAI
fur-trimmed robe, a merchant, maybe, debates some serious matter with a white-tunicked clerk. And the clerk's face—? I turn to mark the straight, blue-black hair. The man must be Chinese. . . .
Then come two short-bearded men in careless indigo-blue raiment, both of them convulsed with laughter—men outside the Rule, who practise, perhaps, some art—and then one of the samurai, in cheerful altercation with a blue-robed girl of eight. "But you could have come back yesterday, Dadda," she persists. He is deeply sunburned, and suddenly there passes before my mind the picture of a snowy mountain waste at nightfall and a solitary small figure under the stars. . . .
When I come back to the present thing again, my eye is caught at once by a young negro, carrying books in his hand, a prosperous-looking, self-respecting young negro in a trimly cut coat of purple-blue and silver.
I am reminded of what my double said to me of race.
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