About nine o’clock
Several mousmes execute , one after another , improvisations on the ` chamecen ' . Others sing in sharp , high voices , hopping about continually , like cicalas in delirium . Madame Prune , no longer able to make a mystery of the long-pent up feelings that agitate her , pays me the most marked and tender attentions , and begs my acceptance of a quantity of little souvenirs : an image , a little vase , a little porcelain goddess of the moon in Satsuma ware , a marvellously grotesque ivory figure ; -- I tremblingly follow her into the dark corners whither she calls me to give me these presents in tete-a-tete . About nine o'clock , with a silken rustling , arrive the three geishas in vogue in Nagasaki : Mesdemoiselles Purete , Orange , and Printemps , whom I have hired at four dollars each -- an enormous price in this country . These three geishas are indeed the very same little creatures I heard singing on the rainy day of my arrival , through the thin panelling of the Garden of Flowers . But as I have now become thoroughly Japanized , today they appear to me more diminutive , less outlandish , and in no way mysterious . I treat them rather as dancers that I have hired , and the idea that I ever had thought of marrying one of them now makes me shrug my shoulders -- as it formerly made M. Kangourou .