“What is the difference—except that such women stand out for a maintenance, while the prostitute takes cash?” I saw that I had shocked her, and I said: “You must be humble about these things, because you have never been poor, and you cannot judge those who have been. But surely you must have known worldly women who married rich men for their money. And surely you admit that that is prostitution?”
She fell suddenly silent, and I saw what I had done, and, no doubt, you will say I should have been ashamed of myself. But when one has seen as much of misery and injustice as I have, one cannot be so patient with the fine artificial delicacies and sentimentalities of the idle rich. I went ahead to tell her some stories, showing her what poverty actually meant to women.
Then, as she remained silent, I asked her how she had managed to remain so ignorant. Surely she must have met with the word “prostitution” in books; she must have heard allusions to the “demi-monde.”
“Of course,” she said, “I used to see conspicuous-looking women at the race-track in New Orleans; I’ve sat near them in restaurants, I’ve known by my mother’s looks and her agitation that they must be bad women. But you see, I didn’t know what it meant—I had nothing but a vague feeling of something dreadful.”
I smiled. “Then Lady Dee did not tell you everything about the possibilities of her system of ‘charm.’”
“No,” said Sylvia. “Evidently she didn’t!” She sat staring at me, trying to get up the courage to go on with this plain speaking.
And at last the courage came. “I think it is wrong,” she exclaimed. “Girls ought not to be kept so ignorant! They ought to know what such things mean. Why, I didn’t even know what marriage meant!”
“Can that be true?” I asked.
“All my life I had thought of marriage, in a way; I had been trained to think of it with every eligible man I met—but to me it meant a home, a place of my own to entertain people in. I pictured myself going driving with my husband, giving dinner-parties to his friends. I knew I’d have to let him kiss me, but beyond that—I had a vague idea of something, but I didn’t think. I had been deliberately trained not to let myself think—to run away from every image that came to me. And I went on dreaming of what I’d wear, and how I’d greet my husband when he came home in the evening.”
“Didn’t you think about children?”