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. “You should see Piccadilly around one o’clock in the morning,” my guide had said to me a little while before, and now I understood. They were all forced out into Piccadilly from everywhere. It was rather a dismal thing sitting here, I must confess. The room was lively enough, but this type of life is so vacant of soul. It is precisely as though one stirred in straw and sawdust, expecting it to be vigorous with the feel of growing life and freshness, such as one finds in a stalk or tree. It is a world of dead ideals I should say--or, better yet, a world in which ideals never had a chance to grow. The women were the veriest birds of prey, cold, weary, disillusioned, angry, dull, sad, perhaps; the men were victims of carnal desire without the ability to understand how weary and disgusted the women were who sought to satisfy them. No clear understanding of life on either side; no suggestion of delicacy or romance. No subtlety of lure or parade. Rather, coarse, hard bargaining in which robbery and abuse and bitter recrimination play a sodden part. I know of nothing so ghastly, so suggestive of a totally dead spirit, so bitter a comment on life and love and youth and hope as a street girl’s weary, speculative, commercial cry of--“Hello, sweetheart!” From this first place we went to others--not so good, Lilly told me. It is a poor world. I do not attempt to explain it. The man or woman of bridled passion is much better off. As for those others, how much are they themselves to blame? Circumstances have so large a part in it. I think, all in all, it is a deadly hell-hole; and yet I know that talking is not going to reform it. Life, in my judgment, does not reform. The world is old. Passion in all classes is about the same. We think this shabby world is worst because it is shabby. But is it? Isn’t it merely that we are different--used to different things? I think so.