she is broken into an inviolable charm of manner incomprehensible to the finest European, yet she is almost invariably a blossom of the lower classes, with dumpy claws, and squat, ugly nails.  Her education, physical and moral, is far harder than that of the ballerina, and her success is achieved only after years of struggle and a bitter agony of torture....  And the geisha’s social position may be compared with that of the European actress.  The Geisha-house offers prizes as desirable as any of the Western stage.  A great geisha with twenty nobles sitting round her, contending for her laughter, and kept in constant check by the flashing bodkin of her wit, holds a position no less high and famous than that of Sarah Bernhardt in her prime.  She is equally sought, equally flattered, quite as madly adored, that quiet little elderly plain girl in dull blue.  But she is prized thus primarily for her tongue, whose power only ripens fully as her physical charms decline.  She demands vast sums for her owners, and even so often appears and dances only at her own pleasure.  Few, if any, Westerners ever see a really famous geisha.  She is too great to come before a European, except for an august or imperial command.  Finally she may, and frequently does, marry into exalted places.  In all this there is not the slightest necessity for any illicit relation.”

In some respects the position of the ancient Greek hetaira was more analogous to that of the Japanese geisha than to that of the prostitute in the strict sense.  For the Greeks, indeed, the hetaira, was not strictly a porne or prostitute at all.  The name meant friend or companion, and the woman to whom the name was applied held an honorable position, which could not be accorded to the mere prostitute.  Athenaeus (Bk. xiii, Chs.  XXVIII-XXX) brings together passages showing that the hetaira could be regarded as an independent citizen, pure, simple, and virtuous, altogether distinct from the common crew of prostitutes, though these might ape her name.  The hetairae “were almost the only Greek women,” says Donaldson (Woman, p. 59), “who exhibited what was best and noblest in women’s nature.”  This fact renders it more intelligible why a woman of such intellectual distinction as Aspasia should have been a hetaira.  There seems little doubt as to her intellectual distinction.  “AEschines, in his dialogue entitled ‘Aspasia,’” writes Gomperz, the historian of Greek philosophy (Greek Thinkers, vol. iii, pp. 124 and 343), “puts in the mouth of that distinguished woman an incisive criticism of the mode of life traditional for her sex.  It would be exceedingly strange,” Gomperz adds, in arguing that an inference may thus be drawn concerning the historical Aspasia, “if three authors—­Plato, Xenophon and AEschines—­had agreed in fictitiously enduing the companion of Pericles with what we might very reasonably have expected her