Violet was still too young to feel keenly for another while herself in suffering, a fact that must have presented itself to Evelyn, because she turned from her own story with an easy shrug.
"After all," she pursued, "the thing's at least better run now that it has become a men's business. There are no jobs left at the top except the running of the houses: the men get the girls, the rents, and most of the profits."
"Fritzie said they got lots of immigrants."
"Well, rather. Most of the Dago ditch-diggers go home every winter, and any one of them will bring a girl back with him as his wife if you'll pay him a little over the price of the passage money. That's one way, but there are a jolly lot more, not to mention the make-believe employment agencies that catch the girls by regiments. The women are packed over here in the steerage like cattle, my dear, and ticketed like low-class freight. All they own goes into a small handbag and once they get here, they're herded ten in a room till the agency-runners call for them. Around Houston Street you can see streets full of those nifty little agencies: they ship the girls all over the States."
"I never thought such things could happen."
"Of course you didn't. Nobody does, my dear—and that's one reason they do happen. Not that the immigrants are unduly favored. All over the East Side you can see families of the Chosen People going into real mourning for cadet-caught girlies, just as if the poor things were really dead. The other races suffer quite as much, too, though the Yankees are less likely to get into the cheaper joints."
"That's where they give them the brass checks?" asked Violet.
"Yes. The man buys the checks downstairs, on a commutation schedule, just the w'y we used to buy our drink checks in a beer garden. The girls never see real money—except when they make a touch, and then it's not any use—because they cash in their checks to the madam, and she counts them against what her young l'idies owe her. Even at that"—Evelyn nearly sat upright in her animation—"even at that, they do s'y the men try to jew you down as badly as they do here. I've always noticed that the honestest man that ever lived will try to cheat a girl. But you'll learn it all in time, girlie. I'm only sorry that you'll never see the better plices."
Violet missed the innuendo, but she asked:
"Then there are better and worse?"