“Miss Sadako Fujinami, daughter of Mr. Fujinami Gentaro,” said Ito.  “She has been University undergraduate, and she speaks English quite well.”

Miss Sadako bowed three times.  Then she said, “How do you do” in a high unnatural voice.

The room was filling up with the little humming-bird women who had been present at the entrance.  They were handing cigarettes and tea cups to the guests.  They looked bright and pleasant; and they interested Geoffrey.

“Are these ladies relatives of the Fujinami family?” he asked Ito.

“Oh, no, not at all,” the lawyer gasped; “you have made great mistake, Mr. Barrington.  Japanese ladies all left at home, never go to restaurant.  These girls are no ladies, they’re geisha girls. Geisha girls very famous to foreign persons.”

Geoffrey knew that he had made his first faux pas.

“Now,” said Mr. Ito, “please step this way; we go upstairs to the feast room.”

The dining-room seemed larger still than the reception room.  Down each side of it were arranged two rows of red lacquer tables, each about eighteen inches high and eighteen inches square.  Mysterious little dishes were placed on each side of these tables; the most conspicuous was a flat reddish fish with a large eye, artistically served in a rollicking attitude, which in itself was an invitation to eat.

The English guests were escorted to two seats at the extreme end of the room, where two tables were laid in isolated glory.  They were to sit there like king and queen, with two rows of their subjects in long aisles to the right and to the left of them.

The seats were cushions merely; but those placed for Geoffrey and Asako were raised on low hassocks.  After them the files of the Fujinami streamed in and took up their appointed positions along the sides of the room.  They were followed by the geisha, each girl carrying a little white china bottle shaped like a vegetable marrow, and a tiny cup like the bath which hygienic old maids provide for their canary birds.

“Japanese sake” said Sadako to her cousin, “you do not like?”

“Oh, yes, I do,” replied Asako, who was intent on enjoying everything.  But on this occasion she had chosen the wrong answer; for real ladies in Japan are not supposed to drink the warm rice wine.

The geisha certainly looked most charming as they slowly advanced in a kind of ritualistic procession.  Their feet like little white mice, the dragging skirts of their spotless kimonos, their exaggerated care and precision, and their stiff conventional attitudes presented a picture from a Satsuma vase.  Their dresses were of all shades, black, blue, purple, grey and mauve.  The corner of the skirt folded back above the instep revealed a glimpse of gaudy underwear provoking to men’s eyes, and displayed the intricate stenciled flower patterns, which in the case of the younger women seemed to be catching hold of the long sleeves and straying upwards.  Little dancing girls, thirteen and fourteen years old—­the so-called hangyoku or half jewels—­accompanied their elder sisters of the profession.  They wore very bright dresses just like the dolls; and their massive coiffure was bedizened with silver spangles and elaborately artificial flowers.