I remember, one summer at a little country hotel, a girl rushed into my room from a neighbor's in order to escape from the urgency of a guest. She told me the following day quite freely of her troubles, of the horrid men that came to the hotel, and of the fact that most of the girls did not mind what she found unendurable. She had been there but a few weeks and was resolved to go home as soon as possible, claiming it was better to starve than to lead such a hard and especially such a disgusting life. Realizing that I had an exceptional opportunity for sociological study, I improved the occasion and asked many questions. When asked for her reasons for not responding to the solicitations of the men, she replied that it was the fear of being laughed at should she have a child. I could not learn that she had ever been taught to regard loose sexual relations before marriage as immoral or as intrinsically wrong. In her mind the question had no connection with religion, so far as I could discover. Her refusal was based wholly on utilitarian grounds. At another hotel where I often stopped I noticed on one of my tours that an especially attractive girl of eighteen or nineteen, who usually waited on me, was no longer there. On asking her substitute what had become of her, I was told she had become a regular prostitute, having found she could earn much more money that way than at the hotel. I asked if the parents had not opposed. "O no!" replied the girl, "the parents were the ones who proposed it and arranged for it." I asked the substitute if she herself did not regard the business as shameful and immoral. She looked at me with apparent surprise, hardly understanding what I meant, evidently regarding the matter entirely as a financial one. Here is another case. A number of Young Men's Christian Association secretaries, tramping in the Japanese Alps, were convinced by the noises one night at the hot springs that the five or six guides and porters were indulging in licentiousness. The next night it came out around the camp-fire that these guides and porters had paid the hotel girls five sen[4] (two and one-half cents) each. [4] A sen has the value of one-hundredth of a yen, or almost half a cent. Of course one may not generalize from three cases. But three such cases, together with the statement of the chief of police, and the experience, closely corresponding with my own, of many missionaries who have traveled in all parts of Japan, are strong evidence. I myself do not think that guests often solicit the girls, nor that hotel girls commonly yield to the requests of guests, but there can be no doubt that it occasionally happens, and is not regarded in any such way by either the men or the women as an Occidental would expect. As said above, there are many hotels in the cities from which geisha are rigidly excluded, and where without doubt the relations of guests with hotel girls are above criticism.