two of the worst of these women you can find, and I'll agree to take them into my home and provide for them until they can find some other home and some other way of making a living. And then you, each one of you, take one girl into your home, under the same conditions, and together we'll try to find homes for the rest."
They looked at him, then looked at each other, and seeing how utterly hopeless this strange man was, they went away.
XLVIII
To be sure, that was in another day. Prostitution
had not become a subject for polite conversation
at the dinner table; pornographic vice commissions
had not been organized and provided with
appropriations so that their hearings might be stenographically
reported and published along with the
filthy details gathered in the stews and slums of cities
by trained smut hunters; it had not yet been discovered
that the marriage ceremony required a new
introduction, based upon the scientific investigations
of the clinical laboratory, and on the same brilliant
thought that centuries ago struck the wise men of
Bohemia, who, when the population increased too
rapidly, prohibited marriages for a number of years
that proved, of course, to be the most prolific the
land had ever known.
The new conception was created in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, by the necromancy of a striking phrase. I do not know who it is that had
