She felt her color coming as she answered: "Why, of course. How could I help it, when you plan things like this for me?" "I have at last found my _métier_; give me more things to do." "Very well. When will you take me to see your Japanese house?" For a second Daunt hesitated. The little native house in the Street-of-the-Misty-Valley was a sentimental place to him. There he had worked out the models of his first Glider; there he had talked with his Princess of Dreams, his "Lady of the Many-Colored Fires." The glimpse of Phil had reminded him that it now had a tenant. When he showed it to Barbara, it should not be with Phil in possession. She noted the hesitation, and, somewhat puzzled, and wondering if to oriental ethics the suggestion was a _gaucherie_, waved the matter lightly aside. "You are just going to say 'one of these days.' Please don't. When I was little, that always meant never. I withdraw the motion--but what is this coming?" A boy was ascending the platform. He bowed and laid a box of thin unpainted wood at Daunt's feet. It contained a _kakemono_, or wall-painting, rolled and tied with a red-and-white cord of twisted rice-paper. Daunt read the accompanying card. "'Miss Happy-for-a-Thousand-Years,'" he said, "'presents her compliments to the illustrious strangers.' She is the star. The gift is a pretty custom, isn't it, even if it is advertisement. Here comes the lady herself to present her thanks for our distinguished patronage." She bowed low before them, smiling, her small piquant face powdered white as mistletoe-berries above her carmine-painted lips. Daunt unrolled the _kakemono_, revealing a delicately-painted cluster of butterflies. He chatted with her in the vernacular, and she replied with much drawing-in of breath and flute-like laughter. "She says," he translated, "that this is a picture of her honorable ancestors." A little smile, a genuflection, a breath of perfume and the powdered face and gorgeous _kimono_ were gone. The orchestra chirruped, the curtain parted and another figure began. Miss Happy-for-a-Thousand-Years! As the party walked back to the waiting _rick'sha_, Barbara wondered what lay beneath that smiling surface. She had heard of the strenuous training that at five years began to teach the gauzy, fragile, child-butterfly to paint its wings, to flirt and sing and dance its dazzling moth-flame way. For the _geisha_ nothing was too gorgeous, too transcendent. Her lovers might be statesmen and princes. But in return she must be always gay, always laughing, always young--all things to all men--to the end of the butterfly chapter! Butterfly hair, butterfly gown--and butterfly heart? Barbara wondered. CHAPTER XXIII THE DEVIL PIPES TO HIS OWN Doctor Bersonin, huge and white-flanneled, with Phil by his side, strolled away through the swarming crowd.