Page:Occult Japan - Lovell.djvu/352

330 expression. It begins at home and spreads out into the farthest suburbs of your polite acquaintance. You begin to be aware that you are setting the fashion in things below as well as upon the surface. Not only do hats, the facsimile of your own last purchase, suddenly make their appearance upon the heads of your friends, but even your momentary tastes wake instant echo in the crania underneath. "It is very odd," one of my very nicest far-eastern familiars was never tired of saying to me as he suited the action to the word, "how I like whatever you like."

This will sound of course like the simple quintescence of exquisite far-oriental politeness. But observation will show you that it is in truth something deeper. You will be convinced of the genuineness of the appreciation after you have been sufficiently its victim.

As for your household, your peculiarities diffuse themselves subtly through it to be reproduced some fine morning in surprisingly incongruous settings. Your "boy," so soon as ever he contrives to get into the coveted foreign garb, appears before you strangely appareled, not simply in