these rather tawdry
people.

In this drab, ineffective gathering, I found one point of colour, like a
red rose on a dingy white tablecloth. This was Beatrice, the daughter of
Clement Blaine. I believe the man had a wife. One figures her as a worn
household drudge. In any case, she made no appearance in any of the
places in which I met Blaine, or his handsome daughter. Beatrice Blaine
was a new type to me. One had read of such girls, but I had never met
them. And I suppose novelty always has a certain charm for youth. One
felt that Beatrice had crossed the Rubicon. Mentally, at all events, one
gathered that she had thrown her bonnet over the windmill.

Physically, materially, I have no doubt that Beatrice was perfectly well
qualified to take care of herself. But here was a very handsome girl who
was entirely without reticence or reserve. With her, many things usually
treated with respect were--"all rot." Beatrice's aim in life was
pleasure, and she not merely admitted, but boasted of the fact. She did
not think much of her father's friends as individuals. She probably
objected to their dinginess. But she acclaimed herself a thoroughgoing
Socialist, I think because she believed that Socialism meant the
provision of plenty in money, dresses, pleasures, and so forth, for all
who were short of these commodities.

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 criminal