Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 6.djvu/112

 Her twenty-five sen (sixpence) an hour is not pay, or wage, or consideration, or any other common kind of earning: it is the "honourable congratulation" (o-shugi.) She receives, in addition, an "honourable flower" (o-hana,) which varies according to the mood of her employer, but is never less than a yen. A statistician might infer from these figures that five hours of "congratulation" plus a "flower"—or, say, a hundred and ten gold cents—represents an excellent daily average. But when a geisha is in vogue, she has invitations to "present her face" at many réunions on the same day, and even half an hour's act of presence entitles her to "one stick of incense" and one "flower." Thus she earns hundreds, not tens, of yen monthly. Then there is the gold that she picks up on the byways of her profession. She may tread them lawfully by purchasing a special license in addition to her geisha ticket, or she may follow them in secrecy and danger. Let it be enough to say that she exploits this mine of wealth to its extreme capacity, but without ever overstepping the limits of feminine reserve. She plays all the time for her own hand. Her quest is a lover sufficiently devoted to remove her from a professional career into private life. If she has been but a pale little star on the public horizon, this process of "redemption" is cheap. But if she has become a luminary, the compensation demanded by her employer for the loss of her services is often very large,