She bade him take her to the gate as quickly as possible and followed him rapidly, stung with an acute longing for the noisy roadway with its careening _rick'sha_. He was a thin, humorous-looking youth with a chocolate skin and long almond eyes, from which he shot at Barbara glances half obsequious, half impertinent and preternaturally sly, from time to time making some remark which she answered as shortly as she might. By the arch with its lofty female figure, under the weeping willow, Barbara turned for an instant and looked back. The street seemed to her a maze of reeling lights--a blur of painted lips and drowsing eyes and ghostly sobbing of the _samisen_. Just outside the gate a pilgrim-priest, his coffin-like shrine strapped on his back, was mumbling a prayer. The guide spoke complacently: "Japan Yoshiwara are very famed," he said. "I think other countries is very seldom to have got." "Where do they all come from?" Barbara asked suddenly. "How do they come to be here?" "From many village," he answered. He had raised his voice, for several passers-by had paused to listen inquisitively to the strange sounds, so uncouthly unlike their own liquid syllabary; and he loved to display his English. "A man have a shop. Business become bad; he owe so plenty money. He can not pay, but he have pretty daughter. Here they offer maybe two, three hundred _yen_, for one year. So she dutifully pay honorable father debt." Barbara turned away. Again she felt the edge of mystery, bred of the unguessable divergence between the moral Shibboleths of West and East. It caught at her like the cool touch of dread that chills the strayer in haunted places. In a hundred ways this land drew her with an extraordinary attraction; now a feeling of baffled perplexity and pain mingled with the fascination. It was almost a sort of terror. If in two days Japan offered such passionate variety, such undreamed contrasts and subtleties, what would it eventually show to her? Could she ever really know it, understand it? "There is a theater near here where Sada Gozen is playing," she said. "Can you take me there?" He nodded. "The _Raimon-za_--the Play-House-of-the-Gate-of-Thunder. It is more five minutes of distant." He conducted her through a maze of narrow streets and pointed to the building, which she saw with a breath of relief. Taking out her purse she put a bill into his hand. "Thank you," she said, "and good night." "I shall go with Madame at her hotel." She shook her head. "I can find my way now." "But Madame--" "No," she said decidedly. He stood a moment swinging his cane, looking after her with impudent almond eyes. Then he lighted a cigarette, settled his derby at a jaunty angle and sauntered back toward the Yoshiwara. * * * * *