“And you are able to deceive them?”
“Yes.”
“That’s interesting. Let me hear you talk like an American. How do you do it?”
She pursed her lips for action. “Well, I guess I’ll have to go now,” she began. It was not a very good imitation. “All Americans say ‘I guess,’” she informed me.
“And what else?” I said.
“Oh, let me see.” She seemed lost for more. “You teach me some,” she said. “I knew some other words, but I forget.”
For half an hour I coached her in American slang. She sat there intensely interested while I drilled her simple memory and her lips in these odd American phrases, and I confess I took a real delight in teaching her. She seemed to think it would raise her market value. And so in a way I was aiding and abetting vice. Poor little Lilly E——! She will end soon enough.
At eleven we departed for the places where she said these women congregated and then I saw what the London underworld of this kind was like. I was told afterwards that it was fairly representative.
This little girl took me to a place on a corner very close to a restaurant we were leaving—I should say two blocks. It was on the second floor and was reached by a wide stairway, which gave into a room like a circle surrounding the head of the stairs as a center. To the left, as we came up, was a bar attended by four or five pretty barmaids, and the room, quite small, was crowded with men and women. The women, or girls rather, for I should say all ranged somewhere between seventeen and twenty-six, were good looking in an ordinary way, but they lacked the “go” of their American sisters.
The tables at which they were seated were ranged around the walls and they were drinking solely to pay the house for allowing them to sit there. Men were coming in and going out, as were the other girls. Sometimes they came in or went out alone. At other times they came in or went out in pairs. Waiters strolled to and fro, and the etiquette of the situation seemed to demand that the women should buy port wine—why, I don’t know. It was vile stuff, tasting as though it were prepared of chemicals and I refused to touch it. I was shown local detectives, girls who worked in pairs, and those lowest of all creatures, the men who traffic in women. I learned now that London closes all its restaurants, saloons, hotel bars and institutions of this kind promptly at twelve-thirty, and then these women are turned out on the streets.