They do! They figure in a way that will make every father and mother who reads this narration, tremble with fear and horror.
These hotels are infested with men of wealth and time, men of dead consciences, men of diseased moral senses, who are always in search of young, innocent, pretty prey for their decaying passions.
Under the pretense of respectability, and with the false counsel that they are safe and protected from harm, these parasites bring their young victims to these hotels, dazzle them with the beauty and luxury about them, rob them of their senses with new and intoxicating delights, and then steal the only priceless gift that God gave them.
That is one phase of the hotel evil, as we see it from a superficial glance. There are a score of others.
In one of the leading hotels of the world, there is a great crime center. Let us enter it.
Down the corridors we walk until we enter the portals of a new vice palace. It is a cafe scene but not of the character witnessed at the place first visited. Everything bespeaks luxury. The music is subtly and softly sensuous. Obsequious waiters tread softly from table to table, taking their orders from rich patrons.
The men sitting about bear the marks of wealth and prosperity. They are money lords, feasting at the table of life and toying away the moments with women who are ready to be purchased for pretty clothes, suppers with wines, and hard, cold dollars and cents.
In the majority, the women we see, are dressed in the latest fashions, brilliant with delicately rouged faces and penciled eyebrows, set off by large and attractive picture hats.
If you study the majority of the faces you will see that they are cut as if of stone. They are faces of women who have lived through tragedies, have thrust those tragedies aside and have reduced life to a mere living from day to day, prepared every hour to barter flesh and blood for cash. But, as in the less pretentious cafe, we find here also the type of girls and women who are just beginning to stray into the broad path of destruction.
Money buys a false air of respectability. It has purchased that pharasaical atmosphere for the big hotels.