H. De Vere Stacpoole

“ He would not like to disappoint her; she was rich, very rich, like all Americans, and he, Danjuro, was poor. What could he do? Rents had to be paid; living, since the war, had become almost an impossibility. Look at the taxes!
Then we had tea, sitting on sea-green mats, and he placed the Musmée just where a golden shaft of sunlight struck the umbrella, so that it became a honey colored halo suffusing the rosebud face with its glow; so that my heart yearned and, taking my cheque book on my knee, I waved a stylographic pen. ”

“ She was worth a hundred and ten pounds, beautiful as a vision and fragile as a flower, all but the umbrella stem, which was a little spear of solid ivory.
And “Ah, but I told you to smoke in a garden!” was all I could get out of Danjuro, that dealer in dragons and dreams, coupled with the platitude that ivory Musmées were not made to be sat upon.
That I know. And also that, according to Ali Akbar, haschish has for its worshiper one hundred and five dreams, of which the dream of essential lightness, the “soap bubble dream,” is the best and most beautiful. ”

“ The festival had spread itself like a gaily colored carpet over the town, the fringes extending even to the bund, where the grave-faced merchants come and go, and even to the harbor, where the hawks wheel over the blue water and perch on the spars of the deep sea ships, tramps and traders, tank steamers of the great oil company, and white Canadian Pacific boats from Vancouver, a thousand miles away across the blue. ”