The assignation houses are usually located convenient to the great arteries of travel, and, as we have already hinted, they are largely patronized; while the number of "flash hotels" which are frequented by the "soiled doves" and their mates, is also numerous and scarcely less notorious than the assignation houses. The proprietors of these "convenient" hotels invariably keep the hotel register required by law, but agreeably fail to ask their lodgers for the time being to chronicle either their own or even a fictitious name, thus, day after day, violating a specific statute.
Besides these, there are assignation houses of a far different character. By these we mean the introducing houses, such as ostensible millinery establishments and the like in fashionable but retired streets, where ladies meet their lovers. Married women of the haut ton, with wealthy, hard-working husbands courting Mammon downtown, imitating the custom of Messalina, not uncommonly make use of these places. Sometimes the lady will even take along her young child as a "blind," and the little innocent will be regaled with sweetmeats in the parlor while the mother keeps her appointment up-stairs.
Liberally, every woman who yields to her passions and loses her virtue is what Tom Hood would have called "one more unfortunate," but many draw a distinction between those who live by promiscuous intercourse, and those who merely manifest, like the ladies referred to above, a penchant for one man. There is still another denomination of this latter kind, whom all the world has heard of as kept mistresses. These women exercise a potent influence upon society and contribute largely to swell the numbers of well-to-do young men who manifest an invincible distaste to marriage. Laïs, when under the protection of a prince of the blood; Aspasia, whose friend is one of the most influential noblemen in the kingdom; Phryne, the chere ami of a well-known officer, or a man of wealth known on the stock exchange and in the city—have all great influence upon the tone of morality, while the glare of their dazzling profligacy falls upon and bewilders those who are in a lower condition of life, and acts as an incentive to similar deeds of licentiousness, though necessarily on a more limited scale.
The prevalence of the kept mistress surpasses the wildest imagining in this city, although in many a home her dire influence has extinguished the Hymeneal torch, and left nothing but ashes and desolation. It is a great mistake to imagine that these kept women are without friends and debarred from society. On the contrary, their acquaintance, if not select, is numerous. They are useful, good-looking, piquant, tasteful and vivacious. Many of them have more than one lover, and conduct their amours with singular finesse, generally escaping detection. They are rarely possessed of more than a smattering of education, because their ranks are recruited from a class where education is not in vogue. They are not, as a rule, disgusted with their mode of living—most of them consider it as a means to an end, and in no measure degrading or polluting. Most of them look forward to marriage and a certain state in society as their ultimate lot. Many of these women reside in the most fashionable apartment houses up-town, and successfully conceal their shame from the inquisitive eye of the respectable matron. They may also be seen in the most fashionable hotels and boarding houses, while they have even crept in as members of institutions and organizations which were incepted solely for the benefit of high-toned and virtuous women. Moreover, they are to be seen in boxes at the theatre and the opera, and in almost every accessible place where wealthy and fashionable people congregate. In point of fact, through the potent influence of their more or less wealthy protector, they possess the open sesame to all places where admittance is not secured by vouchers, and in many instances those apparently insuperable barriers fall before their indorser's tact and address.
[C]HAPTER XIII.
PASSION'S SLAVES AND VICTIMS.
A Matter of Untold History—The Terrible Machinery of the Law as a Means of Persecution—Edwin James's Rascality.
Our practice has furnished many illustrations of Thackeray's shrewd remark, that "Most men have sailed near the dangerous isles of the Sirens at some time of their lives, and some have come away thence wanting a strait-waistcoat." The following is a case in point, which occurred in the time of the Tweed régime. The position, wealth and influence of the somewhat mature Lothario, backed by the more or less corrupt judiciary of those days, prevented the ventilation of this most remarkable and sensational scandal of our times in the newspapers. Begun as a piquant flirtation, the intimacy, so far as the principal actor was concerned, traversed all the stages between bliss and rapture on the one side, and fear and remorse on the other—between garlands of roses and the iron link, forging a clanking manacle of the past. A man of singularly graceful presence and attractive mien; a leading member of the bar, whose Corinthian taste and princely hospitality nominated him as a fitting host of the Queen of England's eldest son, when he visited this city; a prominent figure in the returning board that conferred the Presidency on Hayes; and finally his country's representative at a leading European court; he now sleeps the sleep which sooner or later comes to all—to victim as well as to victimizer.
It was about sundown of a beautiful evening in the early autumn of 1865, that the aristocratic lawyer first beheld the lady with whom he was to become so insanely infatuated. But slightly advanced in the thirties, the widow of a leading officer of the Confederate Army Medical Staff, and formerly a leading Baltimore belle, she was a fascinating and beautiful woman, when meeting the lawyer that evening on Fifth avenue, near Delmonico's old place, she met Fate. It seems to have been a mutual infatuation—a case of love at first sight, and in a moment of delirium, under an impulse which was perhaps uncontrollable, she sacrificed her virtue and her self-respect.
The story of her infatuation reads like the distempered dream of an opium-eater. It was a case of fervent love on both sides. They met on the avenue, looked, spoke and, without more ado, proceeded to Delmonico's to sup. The amour thus begun soon assumed a romantic intensity. When she left the city, he dispatched ridiculously "spoony" telegrams to her in Baltimore, and in his daily letters indulged in a maudlin sentimentality that might have inspired the envy of a sighing Strephon in his teens.