I kept my eyes fixed on hers all the time she was speaking, and I felt as the words came eagerly from her lips that they were the truth.  Her exquisite, untouched beauty, her ardour of passionate welcome to me helped to illustrate it.

I smiled at her.

“Well, I am quite satisfied,” I said; “I believe you have been ‘good,’ as you call it, because you were afraid to be otherwise.  I want to hear a lot more about your husband and how you came here, but I think we had better get out of this place as soon as we can.  Have you any things you want to take with you?”

“Only this,” she said, pointing to an odd, little, hide-covered trunk beside her.  “That has my silk clothes in it and my jewellery.  If you want me to come away I can come now.”

I sat silent for a moment, thinking.  Where should I take her?  Back to my own hotel perhaps for this one night.  It might be managed.  It was getting late, most of the people in the hotel would be in bed when we got there.  To-morrow or the next day we could start for Mexico, where I had made up my mind to go with her.

“Very well,” I said aloud; “shut up your trunk and put something round you, and we’ll go now.”

“You will see Nanine?  You will speak to her?  Let me call her,” said Suzee rather anxiously.  And as I assented she slipped out of the room and reappeared with a fat, coarse-looking woman who grinned amiably as she saw me.  She agreed to let Suzee go with me then and there for another hundred dollars, and said her little trunk should be sent downstairs and put on a cab which the guide could get for us.

While this was being done, she chatted to me, thanked me for the money I had cabled over, and hoped I was satisfied with Suzee, her appearance, and the treatment she had received.  I said I was, and asked how it was the girl had come to her at all.  She seemed a little confused at that, and began to explain volubly that she had had nothing to do with it.  Suzee had come there one night and begged to be taken in, and as she had known some of the girl’s people who had formerly lived in Chinatown, she had done so out of pure pity and charity and love of humanity.

I listened to all this with a smile, and, as I felt I was not getting the truth, did not prolong the conversation.  When the guide came back and said he was ready for us I paid the one hundred dollars and wished her good-night.

She opened the outer door of the room for us, and we went down a staircase this time which eventually led us to a door in another yard from which we gained the street.  The ladder way, I take it, was used chiefly as a convenient exit in case of a raid by the police.  I put Suzee into the cab and jumped in myself, the guide went on the box, and we drove back to the hotel.

It needed a certain amount of moral courage to drive up to the hotel with the scarlet-clad Suzee beside me, but I think possibly artists have a larger share of that useful quality than other men.  Always having been different from others since his childhood, the artist is accustomed to the gaping wonder, the ridicule as well as the admiration, the misunderstanding, of those about him, and it ceases to affect him; while viewing as he does his companions with a certain contempt, knowing them to be less gifted than himself, he sets no store by their opinion.