After that I was ready for anything that might happen. The lift had descended and the porter bade us enter. We stopped at the third floor. In the open doorway of one of the flats Mr. Parker was standing, solid and imposing. He beckoned us, with a broad smile, to follow him. To my surprise there were no locked doors or burly doorkeepers. We hung up our things in the hall and passed into a long room, in which were some fifteen or twenty people. Most of them were sitting round a _chemin de fer_ table; a few were standing at the sideboard eating sandwiches. A dark-haired, dark-eyed, sallow-faced man, a trifle corpulent, undeniably Semitic, who seemed to be in charge of the place, came up and shook hands with Mr. Parker. "Glad to see you, sir--and your daughter," he said, glancing keenly at them both and then at me. "This gentleman is a friend of yours?" "Certainly," Mr. Parker replied. "I won't introduce you, but I'll answer for him." "You would like to play?" "I will play, certainly," Mr. Parker answered cheerfully. "My friend will watch--for the present, at any rate." He waved us away, himself taking a seat at the table. I led Eve to a divan at the farther corner of the room. We sat there and watched the people. There were many whose faces I knew--a sprinkling of stock-brokers, one or two actresses, and half a dozen or so men about town of a dubious type. On the whole the company was scarcely reputable. I looked at Eve and sighed. "Well, what is it?" she asked. "This is no sort of place for you, you know," I ventured. "Here it comes," she laughed; "the real, hidebound, respectable Englishman! I tell you I like it. I like the life; I like the light and shade of it all. I should hate your stiff English country houses, your highly moral amusements, and your dull day-by-day life. Look at those people's faces as they bend over the table!" "Well, I am looking at them," I told her. "I see nothing but greed. I see no face that has not already lost a great part of its attractiveness." "Perhaps!" she replied indifferently. "I will grant you that greed is the keynote of this place; yet even that has its interesting side. Where else do you see it so developed? Where else could you see the same emotion actuating a number of very different people in an altogether different manner?" "For an adventuress," I remarked, "you seem to notice things." "No one in the world, except those who live by adventures, ever has any inducement to notice things," she retorted. "That is why amateurs are such failures. One never does anything so well as when one does it for one's living." "The question is arguable," I submitted. She shrugged her shoulders. "Every question is arguable if it is worth while," she agreed carelessly. "Look at all those people coming in!" "I don't understand it," I confessed. "These places are against the law, yet there seems to be no concealment at all! Why aren't we raided?"