Like all people who have lived easy and joyous lives in those fair regions where gold smoothes every crease and law keeps a tight hand on disorder, she found it hard to realize that there were other regions where gold was useless and law without power.

Twenty-four hours ago she would have declared it impossible that such an experience as she had suffered could happen to anyone; she would have talked airily about civilization and the nineteenth century, and progress and the police.
But her experience was teaching her that human nature remains always the same, and that beneath the thin crust of security on which we good citizens exist the dark and secret forces of crime continue to move, just as they did in the days when you couldn't go from Cheapside to Chelsea without being set upon by thieves.

Her experience was in a fair way to teach her this lesson better than she could have learnt it even in the bureaux of the detective police of Paris, London, and St Petersburg.
'Good morning,' the man repeated, and she glanced at him with a sullen, angry gaze.
'You!' she exclaimed, 'You, Mr Thomas Jackson, if that is your name! Loose me from this chair, and I will talk to you.' Her eyes flashed as she spoke, and the contempt in them added mightily to her beauty.

Mr Thomas Jackson, otherwise Jules, erstwhile head waiter at the Grand Babylon, considered himself a connoisseur in feminine loveliness, and the vision of Nella Racksole smote him like an exquisite blow.
'With pleasure,' he replied.

'I had forgotten that to prevent you from falling I had secured you to the chair'; and with a quick movement he unfastened the band.