“Oh, I’m a seduced milliner,” she said, rather impatiently; “anything you like.”
It required some inducement on my part to make her speak, and overcome the repugnance she seemed to feel at saying any thing about herself.
She was the daughter of respectable parents, and at an early age had imbibed a fondness for a cousin in the army, which in the end caused her ruin. She had gone on from bad to worse after his desertion, and at last found herself among the number of low transpontine women. I asked her why she did not enter a refuge, it might save her life.
“I don’t wish to live,” she replied. “I shall soon get D. T., and then I’ll kill myself in a fit of madness.”
Nevertheless I gave her the address of the secretary of the Midnight Meeting Association, Red Lion Square, and was going away when a young Frenchmen entered the bar, shouting a French song, beginning
Vive l’amour, le vin, et le tabac,
and I left him in conversation with the girl, whose partiality for the brandy bottle had gained her the suggestive name I have mentioned above.
The people who keep the low lodging-houses where these women live, are rapacious, mean, and often dishonest. They charge enormously for their rooms in order to guarantee themselves against loss in the event of their harbouring a “bunter” by mistake, so that the money paid by their honest lodgers covers the default made by those who are fraudulent.
Dr. Ryan, in his book on prostitution, puts the following extraordinary passage, whilst writing about low houses:—
“An enlightened medical gentleman assured me that near what is called the Fleet Ditch almost every house is the lowest and most infamous brothel. There is an aqueduct of large dimensions, into which murdered bodies are precipitated by bullies and discharged at a considerable distance into the Thames, without the slightest chance of recovery.”