Perhaps I was a shade less dingy than the others. At all events, Beatrice honoured me with her favour upon this occasion, and talked to me of pleasure. So far as recollection serves me she connected pleasure chiefly with theatres, restaurants, the habit of supping in public, and the use of hansom cabs. At all events, within the week I squandered two whole sovereigns out of my small hoard on giving this young pagan what she called a "fluffy" evening. It reminded me more than a little of certain rather frantic undergraduate excursions from Cambridge. But Beatrice quoted luscious lines of minor poetry, and threw a certain glamour over a quarter of the town which was a warren of tawdry immorality; the hunting-ground of a pallid-faced battalion of alien pimps and parasites. England was then the one civilized country in the world which still welcomed upon its shores the outcast, rejected, refuse of other lands; and, as a matter of course, when foreign capitals became positively too hot for irreclaimable characters, they flocked into Whitechapel and Soho, there to indulge their natural bent for every kind of criminality known to civilization, save those involving physical risk or physical exertion for the criminal. There were then whole quarters of the metropolis out of which every native resident had gradually been ousted, in which the English language was rarely heard, except during a police raid. Tens of thousands of these unclassed, denationalized foreigners lived and waxed fat by playing upon the foibles and pandering to the weaknesses of the great city's native population. Others, of a higher class, steadily ousted native labour in the various branches of legitimate commerce. We know now, to our cost, something of the malignant danger these foreigners represented. In indirect ways one would have supposed their evil influence was sufficiently obvious then. But I remember that the parties represented by such organs as the _Daily Gazette_ prided themselves upon their furious opposition to any hint of precautions making for the restriction of alien immigration. England was the land of the free, they said. Yet, while boasting that England was the refuge of the persecuted (as well as the rejected) of all lands, we were so wonderfully broad-minded that we upheld anything foreign against anything British, and were intolerant only of English sentiment, English rule, English institutions. I believe Beatrice's conviction of the superiority of the Continent and of foreigners generally was based upon the belief that: "On the Continent people can really enjoy themselves. There's none of our ridiculous English puritanism, and early closing, and rubbish of that sort there."