"Was she unhappy here? Would she not like to go home to her people?"
"Yes, of course, I'd like to go home. Sometimes it's bad here, when the honorable guests are drunk and rough; and some of the other girls are mean and tell lies, and cause trouble. They are jealous of me, and of Yurike-san, and Ainosuke-san, because we are the most popular and make the most money. You know, it's fun every month to go down and look in the big book, for, you know, they must show us our accounts, and see how much you have saved. For I am saving. I'm not like some of the girls who spend all their money on clothes and foolish things and are always in debt. But here the master is pretty good, and in a couple of years I'll have a thousand yen all my own. In some places the masters are cruel and bad and keep the girls in debt always, so they can never get away. No," she cocked her head with a quaint judicious air as if she were gravely weighing the pros and cons; "it isn't so bad."
She spoke of the whole thing as if it were an ordinary business proposition, as she might speak of work in a cotton-spinning mill, or any other occupation. Did she then fail utterly to sense the degradation of her sorry occupation?
"But what about the men then, these scores and scores of guests, caressing you, fondling you----?"
"Oh, of course, that _is_ unpleasant, but then I don't think of them. _Shikataganai_, it can't be helped. I don't give my heart to them; and then in a few years I shall go home, with lots of money, and I shall marry a nice man, and I shall have only him and love him. And then I shall have babies, real babies, instead of dolls."
He was glad that she was like that, that the sordidness and shame passed by her unnoticed, not thought of. Here was surely a "lotus in the mud," as the proverb had it about these women, who, oddly innocent, mind apparently untouched by the grime and depravity of her surroundings, contrived to keep her spirit untouched, apart from it all. But then, she was only a simple peasant girl, ignorant of moral codes, undisturbed by considerations above physical comfort. But there must be others, more imaginative, more complex, with minds sensitive to the constant insult offered by sensuous leer, sake-fraught breaths in their faces, the compulsion of offering love, or the semblance thereof, for a consideration of money, to a succession of unknown men, unsympathetic, contemptuous, careless of their womanhood. As the thought came to him that here, within the space of a few squares of houses, were thousands of these women, many of them surely with delicately adjusted girl souls, enslaved by circumstance to sacrifice what would have been pure, sweet love aspirations, in this vast market place of meretricious caresses, he could understand the indignation of the reformer whom he had heretofore regarded, superciliously, as a well-meaning meddler.