"Do they reform? Well, Mr. Hill says there are so many notions of what reform really is, that he can't say. Some of them reform and become mistresses when they get a chance, and some of them reform and return and reform again by spells. He points out one whom he calls Nellie, and says she went away and was going to lead a strictly honest life, disappeared for six months, and the other night came back again.
"I kept my eye on Nellie, and, needing no introduction, seized a chance to talk with her.
"'I got married, and was as straight as a string for six months,' said she; 'but I had misfortune, and had no other way to support myself but to come back here.'
"'Husband leave you?'
"'He got caught cracking a dry goods store, and is up for two years.'"
The patrons of the variety "dives" are usually young men, clerks, salesmen, and sometimes the trusted employee of a bank or broker's office will get "mashed" upon one of the almost naked women who appear upon the stage, and will thereafter be numbered among the patrons of the resort. Those who have gone into the private boxes once and find the girls obliging enough to sit on their knees and ask them to treat will go there again if they can possibly get the fifty cents that is asked as an admission fee.
Sometimes a party of really Christian men unfamiliar with city ways will get into a variety dive by mistake, and what is more, into the boxes. The glaring sign over the front of the house which simply announces that the place is a theatre attracts them to the box-office.
"Say, Mister, what do you tax us to go in?" one of the party asks.
"Tickets are twenty-five, thirty-five and fifty cents," answers the dapper little man in the box-office who looks as if he ought to be a bar-keeper or a barber.
"Give us five of your half-a-dollar chairs," says the spokesman, throwing down his money, and they are forthwith led to seats in the private boxes, which are no more than long galleries walled in and having two or three windows to which the occupants crowd when anything interesting is going forward on the stage. As I have already said these boxes are connected by doors with the stage and the serio-comic vocalist who has a few minutes to spare will loiter in to strike somebody for a drink.