Page:Love and its hidden history.djvu/139

 If the street-walker ventures out into the brilliant tide of happy and hopeful life that rises and falls in the favorite promenade, she is followed by black and angry glances. As if her breath were poison, as if her touch were certain taint, fine ladies shrink away at her approach, wives and mothers blush with indignation as they see her, and holy men rebuke her with stern contemplation. Through all her disguises, — be her veil as thick and impenetrable as that which hides her destiny, be her garments those of deepest contrition and most suppliant sadness, — bet your life the fellows know her! The gentlemen so proud and handsome, picking petted teeth, or caressing beautiful mustaches at the hotel fronts, or lounging with large eyes and graceful canes over the pave, exchange brief but perfectly understood glances as she goes by, wearily, perhaps; and if none of their up-town friends are in sight (of which they are careful first to assure themselves), bestow upon her a few sly familiarities, of which they have an ample vocabulary.

When it is dark! Who does not know that figure, so laboriously light, of such ghastly gayety, decked with the sacrificial tokens, flowers, and jewels — a bloom in her cheek, but not the bloom of health and innocence; a light in her eye, but not the light of hope, — flashing by there under the gas? Now she walks erect and bold. Now she laughs a sharp and furious laugh. Now her voice strikes a dismal pain to the heart still beautiful in purity, still tender in mercy. Now society shuts its eyes and its doors, and prays to the God of the outcast for the street-walker out in the night.

Dear friends, no. Gentlemen in front of the hotels, no. Careful shepherds, ladies whose necks are so lovely and laces so light, mothers, that some of us remember, sisters, that some of us love, — no.

A descent is just made upon them by a posse of the mayor's police, the same mayor, dear friends, who, when a great many complaints are preferred at his office, by sewing girls and other operatives, who allege that their employers cheat them out of their wages, observes that "he can do nothing for them;" and the newspapers tell all about it in a story which it is a stirring thing for respectable citizens to glance over at breakfast. The reporter shows up the "vile creatures" in all their monstrous rapacity, and