If you aren't the woman I think you are, then this isn't the world I thought it was.

I don't like things held up before me that I cannot have.

She paints her face to hide her face. Her eyes are deep water. It is not for Geisha to want. It is not for geisha to feel. Geisha is an artist of the floating world. She dances, she sings. She entertains you, whatever you want. The rest is shadows, the rest is secret.

We all know that a winter scene, though it may be covered over one day, with even the trees dressed in shawls of snow, will be unrecognizable the following spring. Yet I never imagined such a thing could occur within our very selves.

Perhaps it seems odd that a casual meeting on the street could have brought about such change. But sometimes life is like that isn't it

For a flicker of a moment I imagined a world completely different from the one I'd always known, a world in which I was treated with fairness, even kindness-- a world in which fathers didn't sell their daughters.

All at once I felt so vain, like a girl posturing for the crowds as she walks along, only to discover the street is empty.