I was glad to escape to the platform.
There, however, a group of idlers followed us about and stood in a ring round us when we stopped to interview a railway official.

The beautiful, bronze-haired, ox-eyed young woman in her disreputable attire--I have never seen a broken black feather waggle more shamelessly--was a sight indeed to strike wonderment into the cockney mind.

And perhaps her association with myself added to the incongruity.

I am long and lean and unlovely, I know; but it is my consolation that I look irreproachably respectable.

Of the two I was infinitely the more disturbed by the public attention.