Finally he made up his mind that he might as well begin with old Viscount Kikuchi, the father of young Kikuchi of the Foreign Office, member of the Privy Council, whom he had met through the son and whom he called on occasionally. The name of the Viscount appeared only seldom in the papers, but he was considered by those in the know to be the most brilliant mind in the council, the best informed in respect to international politics; some even insisted that he was the actual director of Japan's foreign policy. Kent had a great liking for him, a gentleman of the old school, who with his marvelously diversified information with regard to the most intricate ramifications of politics of Europe, America and Asia, wide reading in several languages, still chose to preserve the manner and appearance, the admirable traditions of vanishing Japan. His finely chiseled features and long, white beard inspired a feeling of respect, almost reverence, lent him the aspect of a Confucian sage of the old Chinese prints, heightened by the toga-like simplicity of his black silk kimono, unornamented save for the _go mon_, the family crest, a white circle with a conventional heraldic device, white on the field of black on the back below the neck and on the sleeves. He valued the Viscount highly as a source of information and had often been pleasantly surprised at the frankness with which he gave out facts which Kent had not thought it possible to gain, disdaining the secrecy about petty matters so dear to the lesser minds of Japanese officialdom.
Kent had not called for almost a month. It was quite natural to do so now. The Viscount occupied a vast room on the third floor of an office building near Hibiya, an odd rookery housing half a dozen of the euphoniously named societies which have sprung up like mushrooms, in Japan, and which serve no apparent purpose except that of furnishing presidencies and vice-presidencies in legion to numerous honorable gentlemen. As he climbed upward he passed the doors of the Society for Inculcation of Spiritual Influences Among Workmen, the Foreign Policy Debating Club, the Bolivian-Japanese Friendship Society, with their drowsy office boys and idle secretaries smoking over _hibachi_,--a queer collection of vapid purposelessness serving as a foil for the activities of the busy brain up above.