I feel, regretfully, as you must have felt accusingly or uninterestedly, that these stories are far from pleasant. That is because they are true. Each of them was taken raw from Life. The people of the mimic dramas you have watched are no puppets of my imagination; there is no bit of tragedy or of comedy written here, however dingy, that some man or woman has not lived. Whether you accept that old heathen man's hypothesis of Little Gods or not, you have looked on at Games which were played by Some One, or by blind Fate. The East you have seen is the real East, stripped of its glamour and its color, a land where nothing is sacred, where there are indeed no Ten Commandments—no Commander, it seems sometimes—a land of uncertainty and empty Fatalism.
Better, it seems to me, a little less of zest and color, and a little more of ballasting Hope.