”Okay,” he muttered, “the kid gloves come off. Let’s say Skeeter sends you -through the `safest’ tourist gate there is, just for practice. If you walk through the Britannia Gate wearing that getup, the first thing that’s going to happen is some well-bred lady on the other side will either scream or faint. Whores don’t generally stroll through Battersea Park.”
Margo paled, then flushed bright red. “I’m not a whore! And I’m not wearing this dress in London, you’ll notice! I’m wearing it for a bunch of drunken tourists in Victoria Station! Besides, what’s wrong with it? Skeeter showed me photos.”
”Margo, you look like a two-bit trollop in that thing. Skeeter likes skin and he doesn’t have the faintest idea what decently bred Victorian women wore. If he had a photo, it was of a Denver saloon trollop. Denver cathouses are among the few down-time attractions Skeeter Jackson has visited.”
Margo wanted to hide. At least she’d had the sense to tell Skeeter no the couple of times he’d suggested …
”Margo, you’ve just illustrated my point for me: you don’t know what you’re doing and neither does Skeeter. If you’d tried walking through the Britannia Gate in that dress, here’s what would’ve happened: After some poor, shocked matron had a fit of vapors, her outraged gentleman companion would have called for a constable. You’d either have ended up in the Old Bailey for peddling your wares in the wrong part of town or landed in an asylum. Street walkers who went mad from syphilis weren’t handled particularly gently.