A group of men passed her at the moment—foreigners, speaking an unfamiliar tongue. They talked loudly and pointed with their sticks. One of them observed her, and turning, said something to his companions. They looked back. One of them laughed coarsely.
At the sound, which echoed a patent vulgarity in the allusion, the blood flew to her cheeks. The tone had told her in a flash what the palisades, the barred inclosures, the gaudy finery and reversed obi had failed to suggest. A veil was wound about her hat and with nervous haste she drew down its folds over her face, feeling suddenly sick and hot. Driven now by an overpowering desire to find her way out, she doubled desperately back to the wider street.
"Madame!"
She turned, with relief this time, to see "Mr. Y. Nakajima," the guide, of the gold fillings and silver-topped cane.
"You are lost," he said. "Come with me, and I will find you."
She bade him take her to the gate as quickly as possible and followed him rapidly, stung with an acute longing for the noisy roadway with its careening rick'sha. He was a thin, humorous-looking youth with a chocolate skin and long almond eyes, from which he shot at Barbara glances half obsequious, half impertinent and preternaturally sly, from time to time making some remark which she answered as shortly as she might.
By the arch with its lofty female figure, under the weeping willow, Barbara turned for an instant and looked back. The street seemed to her a maze of reeling lights—a blur of painted lips and drowsing eyes and ghostly sobbing of the samisen. Just outside the gate a pilgrim-priest, his coffin-like shrine strapped on his back, was mumbling a prayer.
The guide spoke complacently: "Japan Yoshiwara are very famed," he said. "I think other countries is very seldom to have got."
"Where do they all come from?" Barbara asked suddenly. "How do they come to be here?"
"From many village," he answered. He had raised his voice, for several passers-by had paused to listen inquisitively to the strange sounds, so uncouthly unlike their own liquid syllabary; and he loved to display his English. "A man have a shop. Business become bad; he owe so plenty money. He can not pay, but he have pretty daughter. Here they offer maybe two, three hundred yen, for one year. So she dutifully pay honorable father debt."