Page:Japanese plays and playfellows (1901).djvu/316

276 Europe she wears black. That colour is better suited to the ignoble tragedy of which she is both heroine and victim. At night you may see her hovering furtively about the edge of a square, where shadows hang darkest, or plucking at passers-by with words of vulgar endearment. All she has to offer is momentary pasture for the teeth of desire, since love and confidence, the lanterns of happy wedlock, shed no light on her outcast bed. Society damns, but cannot destroy, her. Shame and solitude are the wages which corrode her soul even more rapidly than her body, though that has become in Christian eyes, as the poet so finely says, "a blasphemy, brandished like a torch before God"; but man, denying her the status of any but an unconvicted criminal, forces her to drop lower and lower through remorse and infamy to the hospital-pallet or the assassin's knife.

How different is her fortune in Japan! There she wears scarlet, garish and bright as the five years' revelry to which, as they might sell a platter or a cup, her parents have sold her; but she is not doomed to the black degradation which robs her Western sister of self-respect. Though the loss of freedom be irksome and submission to buyers disagreeable, yet she is a member of "the oldest profession in the world," in a country where it is not without honour. She is surrounded by companions, well fed and well housed, protected from robbery or murder by the Government and the goddess Inari; above all, she does not live ashamed and boycotted, but plays her part in an active round of duties and ceremonies. If remembered precepts of religious teaching ever visit her, they come, not to threaten, but to console. So far from slipping hell-wards, she is earning the approbation which Heaven