“Well, where I come from was pretty bad,” she ventured, giving me some unpronounceable name. “The people haven’t got much to live on there.” I wish you might have heard the peculiar purr of her accent. “And how far is that?” She gave me the hours from London and the railroad fare in shillings. I think it was about three hours at most. “And Cardiff’s pretty bad,” she added. “There’s lots of mines there. Very deep ones, too. The people are poor there.” “Have you ever been in a mine?” “Yes, sir.” I smiled at her civility, for in entering and leaving the room of the house of assignation, she had helped me on and off with my overcoat, quite as a servant might. I learned a little about Wales through her--its ill-paid life--and then we came back to London. How much did the average street girl really make? I wanted to know. She couldn’t tell me and she was quite honest about it. “Some make more than others,” she said. “I’m not very good at it,” she confessed. “I can’t make much. I don’t know how to get money out of men.” “I know you don’t,” I replied with real sympathy. “You’re not brazen enough. Those eyes of yours are too soft. You shouldn’t lie though, Lilly. You’re better than that. You ought to be in some other work, worse luck.” She didn’t answer, choosing to ignore my petty philosophic concern over something of which I knew so little. We talked of girls--the different kinds. Some were really very pretty, some were not. Some had really nice figures, she said, you could see it. Others were made up terribly and depended on their courage or their audacity to trick money out of men--dissatisfied men. There were regular places they haunted, Piccadilly being the best--the only profitable place for her kind--and there were no houses of ill repute--the police did not allow them. “Yes, but that can’t be,” I said. “And the vice of London isn’t concentrated in just this single spot.” The restaurant we were in--a large but cheap affair--was quite a center, she said. “There must be other places. All the women who do this sort of thing don’t come here. Where do they go?” “There’s another place along Cheapside.” It appeared that there were certain places where the girls congregated in this district--saloons or quasi-restaurants, where they could go and wait for men to speak to them. They could wait twenty minutes at a time and then if no one spoke to them they had to get up and leave, but after twenty minutes or so they could come back again and try their luck, which meant that they would have to buy another drink. Meantime there were other places and they were always full of girls. “You shall take me to that Cheapside place,” I suggested. “I will buy you more cigarettes and a box of candy afterwards. I will pay you for your time.” She thought about her traveling companion whom she had agreed to meet at eleven, and finally promised. The companion was to be left to her fate.