‘Come now,’ protested Zenkō, ‘you mustn’t rely too much on my judgment. Take these girl students nowadays, for instance, with their hair cut straight across the front and their foreign-style parasols. Myself, I just can’t …’

‘Now, now, Mr. Hosoi, the lady’s not looking for a girl to act as mistress for some foreigner. Anyway, I’m sure that if you looked among the child geishas you’d still be able to find a girl with the old ukiyo-e-style beauty that you like.’

‘No – the trouble with me is that I say what I think, and the young girls won’t have anything to do with me.’

As he finished speaking a patter of feet sounded on the stairway leading up from the second floor, a medley of voices chimed in greetings, and four or five apprentice geishas in the charge of an elderly geisha came into the room.

‘Are we late?’ the elderly geisha said to Zenkō, beginning without delay to tune a samisen that a maid handed to her.

The story had been that the wife of an official in the provinces wanted to see a colorful dance by apprentice geishas as something to remember Tokyo by, and the girls were decked out in the gay finery that they would not normally have worn for a daytime engagement.

The preliminary piece of instrumental music over, the young geishas took turns dancing in pairs. Those who were not dancing came to wait on Tomo and her companions, fetching and removing dishes of food and pouring out saké for them. Tomo, who disliked saké, raised her cup to her lips from time to time in order to give her hands something to do as she watched the dancers and the young geishas who sat near her in conversation with Zenkō and Kin.

They must have been aged about fourteen or fifteen. There were two of them who formed a strikingly beautiful pair, yet as they were dancing, one exposed an arm that was thin, dark-skinned and undernourished, while the other had lines at the sides of her sharp nose that showed when she laughed in a way that was brutal and made her look like a heron. The mere idea of such a girl gradually growing to maturity in their family was a chilling prospect, and for the first time Tomo felt almost grateful that her husband had left the choice to her.

After the young geishas had gone, she told Kin what she felt about them.