they have to use dogs for it, and in France, when
these plucky fellows throw themselves into it, surely one wouldn't
grudge the nominal fee of five dollars for which they risk their lives.

But I am forgetting about the Lady from Georgia and her husband. Off
they go in due course from the glittering doors of the restaurant in a
huge taxi with a guide in a peaked hat. The party is all animation. The
lady's face is aglow with moral enthusiasm. The gentleman and his friend
have their coats buttoned tight to their chins for fear that thieves
might leap over the side of the taxi and steal their neckties.

So they go buzzing along the lighted boulevard looking for "something
real wicked." What they want is to see something really and truly
wicked; they don't know just what, but "something bad." They've got the
idea that Paris is one of the wickedest places on earth, and they want
to see it.

[Illustration: The lady's face is aglow with moral enthusiasm.]

Strangely enough, in their own home, the Lady from Georgia is one of
the leaders of the Social Purity movement, and her husband, whose skin
at this moment is stretched as tight as a football with French brandy
and soda, is one of the finest speakers on the Georgia temperance
platform, with a reputation that reaches from Chattanooga to
Chickamauga. They have a son at Yale College whom they are trying to
keep from smoking cigarettes. But here in Paris, so they reckon it,
everything is different. It doesn't occur to them that perhaps it is
wicked to pay out a hundred dollars in an evening hiring other people to
be wicked.

So off they go and are whirled along in the brilliant glare of the
boulevards and up the gloomy, narrow streets that lead to Montmartre.
They visit the Moulin Rouge and the Bal Tabarin, and they see the
Oriental Dances and the Cafe of Hell and the hundred and one other
glittering fakes and false appearances that poor old meretricious Paris
works overtime to prepare for such people as themselves. And the Lady
from Georgia, having seen it all, thanks Heaven that she at least is
pure--which is a beginning--and they go home more enthusiastic than ever
in the Social Purity movement.

But the fact is that if you have about twenty-five thousand new visitors
pouring into a great city every week with their pockets full of money
and clamoring for "something wicked," you've got to do the best you can
for them.

Hence it results that Paris--in appearance, anyway