OBSERVANCES AND PASTIMES
manners, restful and self-contained yet sunny and winsome; her movements, gentle and unobtrusive but musically graceful; her conversation, a piquant mixture of feminine inconsequence and sparkling repartee; her list of light accomplishments inexhaustible; her subjective modesty a model, and her objective complacency unmeasured. Such is the geisha, written about, sung about, and raved about by travellers whom this novel combination of fair sweetness and sordid frailty has moved to a rapture of bewildered admiration, and by " old residents " whose senses, however blasé, however racially intolerant, never become impervious to her abstract attractions. She is generally spoken of as a danseuse, but dancing, though it figures largely in her training, and though her skill in it doubtless contributes much to her graces of movement, constitutes only a minor part of her professional rôle. She has, in fact, no counterpart outside Japan, for while she is a mistress of all seductive arts, seduction is not necessarily her trade, and whereas she never forgets to be a lady, she takes care never to be mistaken for one. Originally she was simply a dancing child (odori-ko), whose trade was to perform in great folks' mansions on festive occasions, and who never degraded herself by accepting an invitation to restaurants or tea-houses. But by and by (1689) the law recognised her as a demoralising influence in military society, and feudal nobles were forbidden to make her a feature at
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