theory. I myself at least, after what I had experienced, would sooner
have gone to the nearest police agent for intimate advice, than back to
my father.

Emmy's home was situated in London on the Thames. The smooth
emerald-green, well-trimmed lawn with the multi-colored flower-borders,
and the blue porcelain vases, extended to the water, and there on
summer afternoons the family sat on the cane chairs partaking of tea,
feeding the swans swimming by, and watching the gay traffic, - the
multitude of graceful little crafts with fashionably dressed men and
women in softly blending tones of green, violet, pink and white, the
muscular gig-rowers in training, shooting by with a regular swish of
oars and followed by shouting friends on horseback; the competitors in
a swimming match making their way amidst all this tumult cheered on
every side; the luxuriant houseboats floating by, full of flowers and
happy people, from which echoed strains of music and a flood of light
emanated at night.

I lived in the suburbs with my father, and when I mingled with the
bright, merry, fair and innocent human world, then all my father had
told me seemed but an ugly fairy-tale.

But London is a strange and, for a person of my temperament, a most
dangerous city. The glamour of angelic human purity is so successfully
assumed there that it makes itself all the more glaringly and horribly
manifest, and exercises a more exciting influence, when the black demon
suddenly leers at us from behind the veil.

Not only Emmy Tenders, but every woman of her type and race, every
cultured English woman, possessed for me something lofty, something