While we dined we talked of men and the types they admired. Englishmen, she thought, were usually attracted toward French girls and Americans liked English girls, but the great trick was to get yourself up like an American girl and speak her patois--imitate her slang, because she was the most popular of all. “Americans and English gentlemen”--she herself made that odd distinction--“like the American girl. I’m sometimes taken for one,” she informed me, “and this hat is like the American hats.” It was. I smiled at the compliment, sordid as it may appear. “Why do they like them?” I asked. “Oh, the American girl is smarter. She walks quicker. She carries herself better. That’s what the men tell me.” “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.