"An honest living! I'd had to gone with any man he said if I'd gone there, and I rather choose my own friends."
"O, Annie, how can you stand there, and tell this over? I should think your heart would burst with grief when you think of it!"
"O pshaw! it's nothing when you get used to it!" said Lissett, and snapping her fingers at the imagination that O'Brien had called up, she flounced out of the room. But for all that, I saw that she choked as she said it, and the tears came in her eyes.
"I hadn't got quite so used to it as to go to that pitch," said O'Brien.
And where are the men that make these women what they are? I asked myself. Coolly walking the streets outside the terrors of the law. At that moment I could have locked all of mankind in solitary, and fed them on bread and water, without suffering one pang. Is there no help for this state of things, that the weak suffer for the sins of the strong? If man does not meet his punishment here he is borne on, by time, to judgment, where he will have no power to screen his guilty acts or shift his punishment upon the helpless.
That reflection did not satisfy me at the time. A more summary retribution would be better suited to the sin. One that would inflict immediate tribulation and anguish upon him, such as had fallen upon his victims.
Annie turned again to look out of the window.
"There is but one woman taking a ride in the fancy carriage of the government. Exercise in that carriage is excellent for dyspepsia."
"Do you know her?" asked Allen.
"No! she's a jail-bird, I know, by her looks. She's come from the Superior Court; she'll have a long sentence. She's coming through the kitchen."