“I suppose so,” said Geoffrey vaguely.

“They sit in shop windows, one might say,” Reggie went on, “only with bars in front like cages in the Zoo.  And they wear gorgeous kimonos, red and gold and blue, and embroidered with flowers and dragons.  It is like nothing I can think of, except aviaries full of wonderful parrakeets and humming-birds.”

“Are they pretty?” Asako asked.

“No, I can’t say they are pretty; and they all seem very much alike to the mere Westerner.  I can’t imagine any body picking out one of them and saying, ‘I love her’—­’she is the loveliest.’  There is a fat, impassive type like Buddha.  There is a foxy animated type which exchanges badinage with the young nuts through the bars of her cage; and there is a merely ugly lumpy type, a kind of cloddish country-girl who exists in all countries.  But the more exclusive houses don’t display their women.  One can only see a row of photographs.  No doubt they are very flattering to their originals.”

Asako was staring at the buildings now, at the high square prison houses, and at the low native roofs.  These had each its little platform, its monohoshi, where much white washing was drying in the sun.

At the farther end of one street a large stucco building, with a Grecian portico, stood athwart the thoroughfare.

“What is that?” said Asako; “it looks like a church.”

“That is the hospital,” answered Reggie.

“But why is there a hospital here?” she asked again.

Yae Smith smiled ever so little at her new friend’s ignorance of the wages of sin.  But nobody answered the question.

* * * * *

There was a movement in the crowd, a pushing back from some unseen locality, like the jolting of railway trucks.  At the same time there was a craning of necks and a murmur of interest.

In the street opposite, the crowd was opening down the centre.  The police, who had sprung up everywhere like the crop of the dragons’ teeth, were dividing the people.  And then, down the path so formed, came the strangest procession which Geoffrey Barrington had ever seen on or off the stage.

High above the heads of the crowd appeared what seemed to be a life-size automaton, a moving waxwork magnificently garbed in white brocade with red and gold embroidery of phenixes, and a huge red sash tied in a bow in front.  The hem of the skirt, turned up with red and thickly wadded, revealed a series of these garments fitting beneath each other, like the leaves of an artichoke.  Under a monumental edifice of hair, bristling like a hedgehog with amber-coloured pins and with silver spangles and rosettes, a blank, impassive little face was staring straight in front of it, utterly expressionless, utterly unnatural, hidden beneath the glaze of enamel—­the china face of a doll.