"You poor little thing." He fished out a ten yen note, grasped both her hands and slipped the bill between them. "See, that's for you. Go and buy another doll, a foreign doll, and when you play with it, you can think of me. It's a souvenir."
She came up to him, placed both her arms about his neck, raised herself on her toes and pressed her warm, whitened cheek against his. "How good you are. Are all foreigners like that? I wish you were not going. It's too bad you have so many wives."
"I expect we had better go and say good-by to Nishimura," remarked Kittrick. The girls led them to the room, but he was dead to the world, snoring noisily, sprawling, arms outstretched over the disordered futon, the woman sitting beside him, patiently stirring a fan. The girls took them to the entrance. The streets were no longer crowded, but a few stragglers gathered and watched them curiously as they sat there, in full view, lacing their shoes. Of course, one knew what was in their minds. The embarrassment of the situation was the finishing touch.
"Whew, I'm glad to get out of this." In the silence of the deserted street, dim now and drab, as the brilliance of the lights had given way to a faint glimmer, the only sounds were their footsteps and, in a distance, the clamor of a watchman's clappers. Kent was ill at ease and wanted to get away from these great, quiet houses, from the sense of knowledge of the sordidness, of the lives of all these women stirring fitfully behind these walls. A policeman obligingly found them an automobile and they started home.
"Well, what do you think of it, Kent?"
"I am mainly disgusted, old man, still, I am just now too confused by clashing impressions to know just what to think. I feel so damned sorry for these women, and yet, oddly enough, that little girl of mine was not particularly unhappy. The shame and the hideousness of it all passed right by her. She might have been far more unhappy in a spinning mill. In a few years she'll pass out of it, marry, and forget all about it. But, of course, there must be others, girls who are fine-souled enough to suffer from the constant degradation that is offered them day after day, every day. The whole damned thing ought to be abolished."
"Yes, that's one side of it," said Kittrick. "Sometimes I'm inclined to agree with you; but then again, at other times I'm not. It's the old question of regulation or no regulation, and it is still an open one. At home we have taken the other tack, but I wonder if we're much better off. You know San Francisco, where you may go out any night and pick up girls, just like these, not held in such bondage perhaps, but, on the other hand, furtive, frightened poor devils who are no better off, who have not even the sense of security that the girls have here. We hear of Piccadilly and Leicester Square. The trouble is that as long as men, or at least a great many men, are what they are, women will be sacrificed. The question is the same here as elsewhere; there's something to be said on both sides. It's rotten either way. I've never been able quite to make up my mind which is best, or worst. But, here in Japan, there is at least one thing in their favor, and that's the marvelous way in which the Japanese manage to place a veneer of artistry, of beauty, externally anyway, over this thing. Of course, we have our opulently gorgeous palaces of sin and all that but they seem flaunting and garish when compared with Japan, where even in this they manage to convey a surface of estheticism, delicate beauty, cleanness, with their spotless rooms, fairy gardens and the rest. It is reflected even in these girls who seldom show the loose sensuousness, the brazen, commercial harlotry of our women of that class. And one thing is certain, these girls here in the case of the lower classes, and the geisha in that of the more well-to-do, have served to preserve the purity of the Japanese married woman. It's the existence of the Yoshiwara and the machiai that turns the Japanese philanderer away from the other man's wife. And seeing the tangles and triangles of our cities, the rotten divorce cases, and knowing that the Japanese family, the unsullied virtue of the matron, is the corner-stone of the Japanese Empire, I'm hanged if I can't at least understand the reluctance of the Japanese in tackling this matter, disgusting and tragic as it is."
It was after midnight when he reached the house, but Jun-san was waiting for him. She never retired to her own little house in the garden until the men were safely home.
"You are late, Kent-san." She smiled, stepped closer, peered at him. "Ah, so you have found one at last. The other night it was a rose, and now—— So she is Japanese." The smile left her face. "Kent-san," she took his hand in her earnestness, "Kent-san, it is so seldom that happiness comes from this, a foreign man and a Japanese girl, but, if you must go on, be kind to her, please."