Few of them are young--many of them are middle-aged, and some are elderly. But they rarely fail to pay their expenses, though they may fail to pay the tradespeople they honour with their patronage. Even in this matter, however, they are careful, and avoid, if they possibly can, any transaction with a shopkeeper which might lead to the publicity of the police court A charge of swindling would be inconvenient. It would necessitate the adoption of a new title, and that would be awkward, because the majority of these adventuresses are too well known to certain people in fashionable resorts to be able to change a title without exciting suspicion. One of the most brilliant adventuresses of recent years posed as a philanthropist, and visited town after town in furtherance of her philanthropic scheme. She was received with open arms by clergymen, and on two occasions was entertained by local mayors. She might have gone on posing as a philanthropist looking about for a deserving charity on which to bestow a vast sum of money, if she had not allowed herself the indiscretion of falling in love with and marrying a young man who was supposed to be the son of an English nobleman. It was when the police got on the track of the Hon. Mr. Dash, eldest son of Lord Fourstars, and made a descent upon his rooms at a fashionable hotel, that one of the detectives was struck by the resemblance the Hon. Mrs. Dash bore to a woman who had been through his hands some years previously. The astonishment of the newly married couple, who were on their honeymoon, was not so much at the arrest as at the discovery that they had both deceived each other. In the lady's case the force of the blow was somewhat mitigated by the fact that she had not really lost a title. She had a previous husband somewhere in the colonies. Both these swindlers met each other first at a fashionable hotel in London. There was some excuse for the man being taken in. When he met the lady she was in the company of a colonial bishop and his wife, with whom she had established quite a friendly intimacy. With one dangerous type of hotel adventuress--the lady with a husband who arrives unexpectedly and late at night from America--I need not deal. But good round sums have been parted with again and again by quite innocent victims to avoid a scandal. It is at the hotel that the wonderful tale is frequently told which never seems to fail to find victims. It is the story of the fortune that is coming. The idea of great expectations appeals at once to the cupidity of certain natures. I know at the present moment a simple-minded couple who have as their guest in their pretty country home a young lady who came to stay a week, and has already stayed three months. The parties met at a London hotel. The young lady made the acquaintance of the country couple, and gradually took them into her confidence. She was the niece of a wealthy Australian, an elderly widower, who had died in London without a will.