Paris never shocks you. There is much low life and there is crime, but it is treated in an artistic way. Every so often they have a wholesale raid to get rid of the undesirables. At a stated time, on a summer evening, suddenly will come marching down all the streets which lead to the tenderloin district hundreds of police, walking four abreast and making a dragnet which sweeps everything before it. Everyone who cannot tell his business, any solitary woman, is caught in its meshes and brought up before the authorities. I was sitting in the Café Américain one night, with a drink before me, when a woman in an evening gown rushed frantically up to my table, saying: “You are my brother.” Nothing loath, I took the cue, but asked, “What is it you want to do?” “Oh, don’t you know what is happening?” she said. “It is the _cordon_.” She took my arm and I escorted her to the door, she all the time protesting her eternal gratitude. If she had been seized alone by the police, that last shame would have been hers. She would have been “put on the card” and become automatically a registered prostitute. Nothing like this happens in London. There, in the first dusk of evening, little girls hardly twelve years old walk past the Criterion Bar and the Haymarket, dressed in long skirts, smirking and smiling and proclaiming their profession to any male they happen to meet. These children are unmolested, and no one seems to object to it in the least, although their manner and language are disgusting as well as pitiable. Then again there are the old women, drunken, disorderly creatures, always ready to engage a chance loiterer in conversation and taking the opportunity to whisper vulgar remarks in his ear; their flabby bodies and flying wisps of coarse gray hair and the ages of vice in their countenances almost denying their human origin. But to all of this London is blissfully unconscious—it is merely the gross side of a male—and, as such, is ignored. My first visit to London was when I was still a student in Paris. I was given one hundred dollars by a patron, evidently with the best intentions, to go across the Channel and paint a portrait of the last of the old-fashioned tallyho-coach drivers. I was a stranger in a strange city; I had never felt the frosted shoulder before. Every other place I had been, even in the north of California, I had been able to make myself at home almost instantly, but here in the country of my ancestors, where every man was as near to me in blood as the people of Concord, Massachusetts, I was as much an alien as if I had been of Oriental origin. I managed to locate the coachman and found him an interesting character, but I could not make any arrangements about painting him; it was impossible to do it in his house. I could not find a studio, and before I had hardly turned around I found my pile reduced to about thirty-five shillings. I decided it was about time to go back to my friends.