With this remark my friend moved away.
CHAPTER XXXVII.
LEADING DOWN TO DEATH.
It is seldom possible to watch the whole career of an abandoned woman. As they step lower and lower in abasement they keep moving from city to city until they reach a stage where the next descent must be into the grave. It is, therefore, difficult to trace their progress, from the “high-toned” fast house to the hospital pallet where they finish a life of loathsomeness by a still more loathsome death.
It has been calculated that the average span of existence for a woman who embraces a life of shame does not average more than five or six years. A year of the irregular life suffices to seriously impair that youth and their good looks, and then they begin to experience the bitterness and the hatefulness of the terrible trade which they have launched themselves. The extravagance and improvidence of their natures soon put them completely in the power of the soulless harridan who keeps the house. She contrives that they shall always be owing her money. She has good security in their wardrobes, and their lives from this time out become one long struggle with debt, hatred of the landlady who oppresses them, ill-health, and disease.
Information derived from many quarters shows with unmistakeable distinctness
THE AWFUL PUNISHMENTS
which follow hard upon the heels of the sin of unchastity. Interviews with medical men set forth a state of affairs the recital of which beggars language to give it due utterance. All that is horrible in human misery and possible in physical debility and degradation visits the bodies of these poor outcasts of the earth.
“When I was a young man,” said a physician to the writer, “I used to think that if a woman who had just taken her first step in infamy were to visit certain of the wards in the great hospitals and see the masses of living putrescence, which were once fair women, who are there rotting away on their last couches, the sight would serve to drive them back into the paths of rectitude and virtue, though all other argument on earth would fail to do so. Doctors get used to terrible sights, but the venereal ward of an hospital never ceases to shock and disgust. No amount of use can make the physician on each recurring visit less sensible of the overwhelming calamity that has overtaken these hapless victims of brutal lust.”
So certain are these terrible consequences to ensue on a life of shame, that women of this class seldom put in a year of the life without contracting one or other of the dreadful diseases which afflict and pursue them to the grave. Their time is spent between the bagnio and the hospital, and each recurrence of their disorders makes them more and more whited sepulchres, moving like an incarnate plague, dealing out poisoned contamination to their guilty male associates, a contamination that confirm in a striking way the terrible dictum of scripture, that the sins of the father shall be visited on the children unto the third and fourth generation. Verily “Her house is the way of hell, leading down to the chambers of death.”