Our pact was soon sealed. I was to have one of the rooms upstairs, and Madame was very objectionable about my paying rent at present. “That can begin when you get an engagement,” she said.

In the meantime I was to make myself generally useful to her, and I soon gathered that many ways of making useful existed in that establishment.

“I let my chambers very easily to gentlemen,” she told me. “It is so convenient, you know, should a lady call, for there to be a dressmaker's establishment on the ground floor; one may suspect a lady who enters a house let in gentlemen's apartments in Jermyn Street, but who shall question the right of a lady, married or single, to visit her dressmaker.”

So it came to pass that I was to be a sort of generally discreet chaperone. Madame used to give her lady clients tea in the upstairs sitting room. When the lady showed signs of being at all timid, I used to be present at the beginning of the tea, and then be suddenly called away, what time the gentleman accomplished his desire. More than a dozen times my errand did not take me further than the keyhole, and from that point of vantage I witnessed some quite amusing performances. I must say that some of Ma-dame's aristocratic lady clients made no bones about haggling over the price of their bodies, just as if they had been ordinary women of the street.

Certainly the profits of the establishment appeared to be considerable; and one day, after a particularly good lunch, Madame Karl surprised me with her tale of the business done for the day.

“You remember the pretty little girl in the blue costume who came in here this morning,” she said, “the one I left upstairs with you?”

I remembered perfectly well.

“She is Lord Wetlon's daughter. They are not at all well off, but naturally she loves pretty clothes. Well, you recollect the dark little gentleman who came in afterwards, whom you left up there with her. He is Christopher Echsstein, the broker. What she did for it, I don't know, but he ordered 250 pounds worth of dresses for her, and, what is more, gave me a check in advance. He's a true Jew, he wanted the discount.”