My impression, as I stepped from the elevator, was much as that of a man who alights from a train in a strange city on a carnival night. Before me, instead of the narrow, quiet streets of the working and living quarters of the city, there spread a broad and seemingly endless hall of revelry, broken only by the massive grey pillars that held up the multi-floored city. The place was thronged with men of varied ranks and professions. But more numerous and conspicuous were the women, the first and only women that I had seen among the Germans--the Free Women of Berlin, dressed in gorgeous and daring costumes; women of whom but few were beautiful, yet in whose tinted cheeks and sparkling eyes was all the lure of parasitic love. The multi-hued apparel of the throng dazzled and astonished me. Elsewhere I had found a sterile monotony of dress and even of stature and features. But here was resplendent variety and display. Men from all the professional and military classes mingled indiscriminately, their divers uniforms and decorations suggesting a dress ball in the capital of the world. But the motley costumes of the women, who dressed with the license of unrestrained individuality, were even more startling and bizarre--a kaleidoscopic fantastic masquerade. I wondered if the rule of convention and tyranny of style had lost all hold upon these women. And yet I decided, as I watched more closely, that there was not an absence of style but rather a warfare of styles. The costumes varied from the veiled and beruffled displays, that left one confounded as to what manner of creature dwelt therein, to the other extreme of mere gaudily ornamented nudity. I smiled as I recalled the world-old argument on the relative modesty of much or little clothing, for here immodesty was competing side by side in both extremes, both seemingly equally successful. But it was not alone in the matter of dress that the women of the Free Level varied. They differed even more strikingly in form and feature, for, as I was later more fully to comprehend, these women were drawn from all the artificially specialized breeds into which German science had wrought the human species. Most striking and most numerous were those whom I rightly guessed to be of the labour strain. Proportionally not quite so large as the males of the breed, yet they were huge, full-formed, fleshly creatures, with milky white skin for the most part crudely painted with splashes of vermilion and with blued or blackened brows. The garishness of their dress and ornament clearly bespoke the poorer quality of their intellect, yet to my disgust they seemed fully as popular with the men as the smaller and more refined types, evidently from the intellectual strains of the race. Happily these ungainly women of the labour strain were inclined to herd by themselves and I hastened to direct my steps to avoid as much as possible their overwhelming presence.