The situation grew on Kent's nerves. Every morning when he looked out from his window, he half expected to see red flags in the streets, to hear the turmoil of mobs. It was absurd, he told himself. There were sure to be warnings, minor tumults, evidences of strained unrest. Still, he felt that he must spare no time in getting inside the facts as soon as possible, to come to see every side of the comprehensive picture.
It would be a good idea to become acquainted with the capitalistic side of the story. He began a round of calls on the money kings, captains of industry, the owners of names which recurred constantly in the news of economic events. For days he wandered about in the lairs of plutocracy, sent his card in to dozens of men, wasted hours in bleak waiting rooms with their scant furnishing of variegated chairs and tables, dusty curtains and innumerable ash trays, smoked idly while hundreds of clerks ran about, like bees in huge hives, or sat smoking and drinking tea. But the great men were always out of the city, or sick, or attending funerals of relatives. There was courtesy everywhere. Would he not see such and such a secretary or third vice-president instead? When he insisted, they shook their heads, a bit surprised at the effrontery of this stranger who thought that he might thus easily gain speech with the great ones. They were amusingly absurd, these foreigners, seemed to be their thought. It was as if he had marched into Buckingham Palace and demanded an interview with King George. He knew that he could probably make his way into even these hallowed sanctums, should he obtain letters of introduction from the Foreign Office, which was always most obliging in such matters. He know that letters of introduction held an exaggerated value, were regarded as almost indispensable by the Japanese themselves. But they aroused his resentment, these haughty, purse-proud plutocrats. Evidently talking to the press was the last thing they desired. Well, let them go to blazes then; if they did not want him to have their side of the story. He'd get it elsewhere.
But Kent's peregrinations into the labyrinth of Japanese economics were interrupted by a letter from Hopkinson, his editor, brought by hand by a tourist friend who happened to pass through Japan. Kent was glad to be certain that it had not passed through the uncertainties of the Japanese post office or the more insidious danger of the ever prying unseen hands.