become quite serious.

"After all," she said, "is it any worse than Piccadilly Circus at
night?"

"It is not a question of better or worse," argued Laking. "Such a
purely mercenary system is a terrible offence to our most cherished
belief. We may be hypocrites, but our hypocrisy itself is an admission
of guilt and an act of worship. To us, even to the readiest sinners
among us, woman is always something divine. The lowest assignation
of the streets has at least a disguise of romance. It symbolises
the words and the ways of Love, even if it parodies them. But to the
Japanese, woman must be merely animal. You buy a girl as you buy a
cow."

Lady Everington shivered, but she tried to live up to her reputation
of being shocked by nothing.

"Well, that is true, after all, whether in Piccadilly or in the
Yoshiwara. All prostitution is just a commercial transaction."

"Perhaps," said the young diplomat, "but what about the Ideal at the
back of our minds? Passion is often a grotesque incarnation of the
Ideal, like a savage's rude image of his god. A glimpse of the ideal
is possible in Piccadilly, and impossible in the Yoshiwara. The divine
something was visible in Marguérite Gautier; little Hugh saw it even
in Nana. For one thing, here in London, in the dirtiest of sordid
dramas, it is still the woman who gives, but in Japan it is always the
man who takes."