an talk English with unholy fluency. The
recurrence suggests--only suggests, mind--a grim possibility of the
affectation of excessive virtue by day, tempered with the sort of
unwholesome enjoyment after dusk--this loafing and lobbying and
chattering and smoking, and unless the bottles lie, tippling, among the
foul-tongued handmaidens of the Dainty Iniquity. How many men follow
this double, deleterious sort of life? The Police are discreetly dumb.

"Now don't go talking about 'domiciliary visits' just because this one
happens to be a pretty woman. We've _got_ to know these creatures. They
make the rich man and the poor spend their money; and when a man can't
get money for 'em honestly, he comes under _our_ notice. Now do you see?
If there was any domiciliary 'visit' about it, the whole houseful would
be hidden past our finding as soon as we turned up in the courtyard.
We're friends--to a certain extent." And, indeed, it seemed no difficult
thing to be friends to any extent with the Dainty Iniquity who was so
surpassingly different from all that experience taught of the beauty of
the East. Here was the face from which a man could write _Lalla Rookhs_
by the dozen, and believe every work that he wrote. Hers was the beauty
that Byron sang of when he wrote--

"Remember, if you come here alone, the chances are that you'll be
clubbed, or stuck, or, anyhow, mobbed. You'll understand that this part
of the world is shut to Europeans--absolutely. Mind the steps, and
follow on." The vision dies out in the smells and gross darkness of the
night, in evil, time-rotten brickwork, and another wilderness of shut-up
houses.

Follows, after another plunge into a passage of a courtyard, and up a
staircase, the apparition of a Fat Vice, in whom is no sort of romance,
nor beauty, but unlimited coarse humour. She too is studded with jewels,
and her house is even finer than the house of the other, and more
infested with the extraordinary men who speak such good English and are
so deferential to the Police. The Fat Vice has been a great leader of
fashion in her day, and stripped a zemindar Raja to his last
acre--insomuch that he ended in the House of Correction for a theft
committed for her sake. Native opinion has it that she is a "monstrous
well-preserved woman." On this point, as on some others, the races will
agree to differ.

The scene changes suddenly as a slide in a magic lantern. Dainty
Iniquity and Fat Vice slide away on a roll of s