They call them demi mondaines and nymphs du pave in Paris, and it doesn’t sound so bad, but here a spade is called a spade with coarse brutality and vice doesn’t receive even a very thin coating of veneer.
Take a walk any night along the streets where women congregate—you know the kind of women I mean—and study the faces. Look for weakness, and strength, and character. Look for good and evil. You don’t have to be a mind reader, just a plain, ordinary, everyday sort of a man with average intelligence.
If you look for the outward signs of degradation in the uptown districts you’ll be disappointed; you’ll have to turn your face and your steps Batteryward to find that. Vice has a degrading and demoralizing influence and its victim, in following that unwritten law of nature that governs the universe, is ever on the downward path. In some cases it is a gentle descent, while in others it is simply a series of steps each one lower than the other, and at the last there is nothing but pity for the poor devils of women to whom no man lifts his hat or bows his head, and who cease to live in merely existing.
And for eight out of every ten there are eight men somewhere whose hands gave the push that sent them on the downhill road.
But once in a while—once in a very great while—justice comes to a man as it did in this case, and that’s the story.
She had such a superb figure that she once posed for a sculptor
Locked up securely in the City Prison like a rat is locked in a trap, or a dangerous beast is fastened behind iron bars, is a pretty little black-eyed French girl.
Julie, her name is, and those who see and talk to her find in her a great charm; a charm, that had she been placed in a different atmosphere or had the lines of her life been cast in different places, would have been so far-reaching as to make her a power. She had such a charming figure that she once posed for a sculptor. Many a woman’s hand has shaped the course of destiny in this world of ours, and the power behind the throne usually wears petticoats.
This Julie takes her imprisonment calmly, because she is a philosopher by force of circumstances. She knows the metal bars can resist her, consequently she doesn’t throw herself against them and there are no tears in her eyes because she can never cry again. She doesn’t know what they will eventually do to her and she doesn’t care. If it is decreed that she shall go forth free, good; then she will go. If it is decreed that for the rest of her life she shall be doomed to wear that narrow blue prison stripe, she will at least be fed and housed and cared for, and on rainy, stormy days she will be under shelter and not compelled to walk the streets with dripping skirts until the gray morning comes over the roof tops.