Another thing that startled and almost terrified me was the absence of a certain conventionality of restraint that had ruled everybody in that other world of mine. For instance, among those gibing at me was a gray-bearded man who danced before me like a small urchin. Another made an expressive pantomime of death. A girl stuck out her tongue at me. I remembered the plaint, that never since the glorious age of Greece had the code of public morality coincided with that privately held. This we all knew; the statesman in parliament was not on bowing terms with the same statesman in the smoking-room. Some said it was Christianity, others respectability that bound us in this organic hypocrisy; but now the two codes seemed to have coalesced. A grandfather grimaced at me; a gray-haired woman put out her foot to trip me; if there had been stones I think they would have flung them at me. But suddenly a youngish lad in white appeared, and the crowd, hastening to make a path for him, shrank back with servile demeanor. Taking advantage of this, my captors, linking their arms in mine, made a rush forward, scattering the mob right and left, and bore me through a swinging door into a small rotunda, in which a number of other policemen were seated with their blue-clad prisoners. CHAPTER V LONDON’S WELCOME Inside the rotunda a burly man in blue, with the white shield on his breast, was standing on guard in front of a second swinging door, above which was painted something in the same strange characters. A few words to him from my captors apparently secured us precedence, for he stared at me curiously, opened the door, and bawled to some person inside. I was pushed into a large courtroom. It contained no seats, however, for spectators or witnesses. The only occupants were the magistrate and his clerk, and a group of policemen who lounged at one end of the room, joking among themselves. The clerk, a little, obsequious man in blue, was seated at a desk immediately opposite that of his chief, a pompous, surly fellow in white, wearing about his shoulders a lusterless black cape, which seemed to be a truncation of the old legal gown. Placing me on a platform near the clerk’s desk, the two policemen who were in charge of me stepped forward and began an explanation in low tones which was not meant to meet my ears, and did not. The magistrate started nervously, and, putting his hand beneath his desk, pulled up a truncheon similar to those that I had seen in the cellar. He handled this nervously during our interview. “Well, what have you to say, you filthy defective?” he shouted at me, when the police had ended. I heard a suppressed chuckle behind me, and then became aware that all the police had gathered about me, convulsed with amusement at my rags. “Stand back, you swine!” bellowed the magistrate. “Give me the Escaped Defectives Book,” he added, to his clerk.