Page:Forty years of it (IA fortyyearsofit00whitiala).pdf/288

 two of the worst of these women you can find, and I'll agree to take them into my home and provide for them until they can find some other home and some other way of making a living. And then you, each one of you, take one girl into your home, under the same conditions, and together we'll try to find homes for the rest."

They looked at him, then looked at each other, and seeing how utterly hopeless this strange man was, they went away.

XLVIII

To be sure, that was in another day. Prostitution had not become a subject for polite conversation at the dinner table; pornographic vice commissions had not been organized and provided with appropriations so that their hearings might be stenographically reported and published along with the filthy details gathered in the stews and slums of cities by trained smut hunters; it had not yet been discovered that the marriage ceremony required a new introduction, based upon the scientific investigations of the clinical laboratory, and on the same brilliant thought that centuries ago struck the wise men of Bohemia, who, when the population increased too rapidly, prohibited marriages for a number of years that proved, of course, to be the most prolific the land had ever known.

The new conception was created in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, by the necromancy of a striking phrase. I do not know who it is that had