Reader, did you ever try to estimate the malign influence upon society of one single fallen woman? Did you ever endeavor to calculate the evils of such a leaven stealthily disseminating its influence in a community?
Woman, courted, flattered, fondled, tempted and deceived, becomes in turn the terrible Nemesis--the insatiate Avenger of her s.e.x! Armed with a power which is all but irresistible, and stripped of that which alone can retain and purify her influence, she steps upon the arena of life ready to act her part in the demoralization of society. As some one has remarked, "the _lex talionis_--the law of retaliation--is hers. Society has made her what she is, and must now be governed by her potent influence." Surely the weight of this influence baffles computation!
View it in shattered domestic ties, in the sacrifice of family peace, in the cold desolation of once happy homes! See the eldest son and hope of a proud family, educated in an atmosphere of virtue and principle, who has given promise of high and n.o.ble qualities. He falls a victim to the fashionable vice, and carries back to his. .h.i.therto untainted home the lethal influence he has imbibed. Another and another, within the range of that influence, suffers for his lapse from moral rect.i.tude, and they in turn become the agents and disseminators of fresh evils.
This promiscuous a.s.sociation is tacitly regarded as a necessary evil, the suppression of which would produce alarming and disastrous effects upon the community at large. The pa.s.sions, indolence, and the love of dress and display are the main agents in producing the cla.s.s of women we have under consideration. It is a vulgar error and a popular delusion, that the life of a fallen woman is as revolting to herself as it appears to the moralist and philanthropist. Authors of vivid imagination love to portray the misery that is brought on an innocent and confiding girl by the perfidy and desertion of her seducer. The stage presents the picture with all its accessories of light, color and morbid emotion. The pulpit takes up the theme and howls its evangelical horrors, picturing those women as being a continuous prey to "the long-beaked, filthy vulture of unending despair." Women who in youth have lost their virtue, often contrive to retain their reputation, and even when this is not the case, frequently amalgamate with the purer portion of the population, and become, to all outward appearance, good members of society.
The love of woman is usually pure and elevated. But when she devotes her affections to a man who realizes her ideal, she does not hesitate to sacrifice all she holds dear for his gratification. Actuated by a n.o.ble self-abnegation, she derives a melancholy pleasure from the knowledge that she has utterly given up all she had formerly so zealously guarded, and she feels that her love has reached its grand climacteric when she abandons herself, without redemption, to the idol she has set up in the highest place in her soul. This heroic martyrdom is one of the recognizable causes of the immorality that insidiously permeates our social system.
The crime of prost.i.tution can be witnessed in New York in every phase in which it invites or repels the pa.s.sions of men. There are the splendid parlor houses distributed in the most fashionable parts of the city; there are the bar houses; there are the dance houses; and there are the miserable bas.e.m.e.nts where this traffic is seen in its hideous deformity, divested of the gaslight glare and tinsel of the high-toned seraglios.
The internal arrangements of the palatial bagnios are in many instances sumptuous, magnificent and suggestive. The walls of these seductive a.r.s.enals, too, are frequently of a color calculated to throw the most becoming shade over the inmates, while the pictures on the walls usually suggest resplendent sensuality. Many of these gilded palaces are patronized by prominent citizens, officials in the government, state and civic employ. Many of them, already married, keep mistresses in these establishments, while others are content to be recognized as "lovers" of the inmates. Many of the country merchants who periodically visit New York insist on being taken the "grand rounds," as it is termed, before they will order goods or attend to business at all. The salesmen in our leading houses are expect to be posted, and to act as escorts sad chaperones in this wine-guzzling tour. Indeed, so much is this disgraceful feature recognized in some large business houses, that the proprietors make an allowance to their salesmen for this purpose.
The proprietresses of these houses are all impervious to shame, and carry on their trade with the sole ambition of realizing money. Many of them have summer establishments and suburban villas at the watering-places, and carry on their nefarious business at Saratoga, Long Branch, Coney Island, Newport and Cape May during the summer mouths.
Many of them own handsome equipages, in which, gorgeously attired, with liveried menials, they show themselves in Central Park to the envy of the virtuous and honest of womankind. It is in the places kept by these women, where the inmates are usually handsome young girls between the ages of fifteen and thirty, that the precocious and well-to-do young men of this city fall an easy prey to vice, and become in time the haggard and dissolute man of the town, or degenerate into the forger, the bank defaulter or the swindler.
The bar and bas.e.m.e.nt brothels, profusely scattered over the lower portions of the city, present the most miserable phase of this disgusting evil. Nearly all these places are kept by men, though nominally under control of their mistresses and wives, who are generally hideous specimens of womanhood, and whose features present the traits of sensuality, cruelty and avarice as clearly expressed as if traced there by Belial himself. The men, flashily dressed and bejeweled, their flabby features decorated by a huge dyed mustache, frequent race courses and other places of public resort, and loud in appearance as they are obscene in talk, are, in the estimation of every self-respecting man, eminently fitted by Lucifer for laboring in the State-prison quarries for the term of their natural lives.
The inmates of these bas.e.m.e.nt brothels invite the pencil of a Hogarth.
Their bloated forms, pimpled features and bloodshot eyes are suggestive of an Inferno, while their tawdry dresses, brazen leer, and disgusting a.s.sumption of an air of gay abandon, emphasizes their hideousness and renders it more repulsive. Most of them have pa.s.sed through the successive grades of immorality. Some of them have been the queenly mistress of the spendthrift, and have descended, step by step, to the foul, degraded beings of those human charnel-houses. In some instances fresh-looking girls will be seen, and careful inquiry will discover the fact that they were either emigrant or innocent country girls, who have been inveigled into these dens by the arts of procuresses or brought there by their seducers. Unsophisticated and unacquainted with life in a great city, without money or friends, they have been entrapped and compelled to submit to a life of shame by the coa.r.s.e words and frequently the brutal violence of their captors.
Between the two extremes of unfortunates already described, there is another cla.s.s nomadic in their habits. Some of these are street-walkers, some frequent dance houses like The Allen"s, Billy McGlory"s, Owney Geoghegan"s and Harry Hill"s, while others circulate around such up-town, west-side houses as the French Madame"s, the Haymarket and Tom Gould"s. They usually live in furnished rooms, in houses owned by wealthy and respectable citizens, let to them by agents who lease them at exorbitant rents, paid in advance. In both the eastern, western and central portions of the city they may be found occupying rooms on the same floors with respectable families. These women seldom conduct the prey that they have allured to their home, but to some a.s.signation house or fourth-rate hotel, of which there are a large number scattered over the city.
Most of this cla.s.s of unfortunates have a "lover"--a gambler or pimp, who occupies their room and a.s.sumes the role of husband and protector for the nonce, with the privilege of spending the girl"s blood money in drink or dissipation, and unmercifully beating her when he feels inclined that way. The pair call this place their home, and as they are shiftless in their habits, and careless of sickness, they are frequently in a condition of chronic impecuniosity and are thus liable to be "fired out" by the heartless agent. Many of these girls, from their a.s.sociation with vicious society, become thieves, and ply their light-fingered privateering while caressing their victim. It is a favorite dodge of some of the more comely and shapely of this cla.s.s, especially the frequenters of such places as Gould"s, the Haymarket, the French Ma-dames, the Star and Garter, and the Empire, to ask gentlemen on whom they have been unavailingly airing their becks and nods and other fascinations to put a quarter into the top of their hosiery "for luck."
They usually get the quarter, and sometimes the man as well.
The a.s.signation 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 a.s.signation 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 fict.i.tious name, thus, day after day, violating a specific statute.
Besides these, there are a.s.signation 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 pa.s.sions 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. Las, when under the protection of a prince of the blood; Aspasia, whose friend is one of the most influential n.o.blemen 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 surpa.s.ses 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 cla.s.s 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 inst.i.tutions 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.
CHAPTER XIII.
Pa.s.sION"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 ill.u.s.trations 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 _regime_. 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 princ.i.p.al 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 a.s.sumed 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.
During the summer of 1866, while his wife was in the country, he brought his Baltimore inamoretta to New York, and established her in his splendid mansion on the Avenue. With an impudence and infatuation perfectly astounding in so shrewd a man, he took no pains to conceal his conquest. Jauntily would he pace down Broadway with her on his arm in the morning, and in the evening she would be in waiting to accompany him home.
Tidings of this open _liaison_ reached the lawyer"s wife in her retreat among the Vermont hills, and she promptly came to New York and dislodged the mistress _pro tem_. Relatives of the infatuated widow also appeared at this juncture and strongly urged her to conquer her mad infatuation, while a like appeal was made to the lawyer. But he was deaf to reason.
He refused to give up his idol, and the widow declared her intention, to use her own language, "of sticking to him as long as he had a b.u.t.ton on his coat."
Time sped on. The lawyer"s pa.s.sion began to be exhausted, and the unending insistence of her"s began to excite his repugnance. As Ouida happily remarked, "A woman who is ice to his fire, is less pain to a man than the woman who is fire to his ice." There is hope for him in the one, but only a dreary despair in the other. In the latter part of 1867, the lawyer began to realize the force of this philosophy. The amorous widow was then boarding at the Metropolitan Hotel, and he began to take the initiatory steps to be rid of her. After two years of madness, during which she had sacrificed the respect of every relative she had, including her own daughter, a pretty girl in her teens, it was hardly likely that he would evince the moral courage to declare openly and straightforward to her that their relations must end. On the contrary, he invoked the aid of three lawyers--two of them her own cousins, the other bearing an historic name--to kidnap and spirit her out of the city. First they forcibly conveyed her to police headquarters. Then, in spite of tears and protestations, she was kept all night in a dark room.
Her screams and entreaties might have moved a heart of stone, but they were unavailing. In the morning she saw Superintendent Kennedy, and demanded the cause of the outrage. He informed her that she had been brought there on a charge of being insane about the lawyer. A physician was summoned, and by his direction, after he had submitted her to an examination, she was sent back to her hotel. During the same afternoon, the lawyer called and emphatically denied having had any hand in her contemplated imprisonment, and secured her release, conveniently imputing the conspiracy to the jealousy of his wife.
Meantime, however, the lawyer and his fellow-accomplices of the law were plotting to get the wretched woman placed in some private asylum.
Bloomingdale and Flushing asylums were full, and as she continued to follow her whilom lover and importune him to visit her, he found it politic and convenient to renew his attentions and to feign a revival of his pa.s.sion. In a certain sense, he was to be pitied. Love of this kind begins as a gift; but a woman of this temperament does not leave it so.
She promptly turned it into a debt, and the more she loved the debtor, the more oppressively and inexorably did she extort the uttermost penny from him. About this time she was introduced to an eminent medical specialist in mental diseases, who, by some inexplicable means, was induced to give a certificate of her insanity. Then her cousins took her before a justice, and swore that she was an indigent lunatic, upon which showing the court issued an order of committal to an asylum. A few days before her contemplated abduction, the lawyer induced her to board at the Astor House, and on the morning of February 26, 1868, he being engaged in the Federal court, while she was leisurely sauntering along Broadway looking for him, as was her wont, she was suddenly seized by three hired ruffians, hustled into a carriage, gagged and driven rapidly up-town to Central Park, when the bandage was removed from her mouth.
For four mortal hours she was driven about the park in the company of her brutal captors, and afterward placed on board the afternoon train for Albany at the old Hudson River depot. "All along the road," as she subsequently told the writer, "I implored the conductor to furnish me with paper and pencil so that I might telegraph to New York, but it was only when we reached the end of the journey that he did so. I gave him money to pay for the dispatch, but he probably never sent it. When I reached Utica I was placed in a pretty bad ward, and when the physician, Dr. Kellogg, saw me he went and reported to Dr. Gray, the director of the place. When he came up he said I must not be treated so, and I was at once removed to the well ward; I remained there two weeks, when I was discharged." Yes, she was discharged, and was received with crocodile congratulations by the lawyer and one of her lawyer cousins, and triumphantly, as it were, transported back to New York.
She was now placed in elegant apartments in the Hoffman House, and her lawyer lover resumed his visits as formerly. During the summer she went to the country at his expense, and when, in September, 1868, she returned to the city, he finally ceased to visit her. She was frantic with disappointment, and her insane infatuation led her into all manner of indelicate demonstrations. She dogged him in the streets; she followed him into court and interrupted him in his pleadings. Sometimes she sat on the stoop of his elegant mansion all night. Once she dressed herself as a soldier, and tried to gain access to him. Frequently she waylaid him, and sunk upon the pavement in real or a.s.sumed paroxysmal fits when he approached. There were other demonstrations that no decent pen could describe, except in a medical book for purposes of science.
Naturally the unfortunate lawyer was driven to the brink of desperation, and at this time he never went out of doors without being accompanied by two detectives to protect him from her indelicate approaches.
On November 16, 1868, he caused her to be arrested for disorderly conduct and thrown into the Tombs. The lawyer with the historic name appeared against her, and, to use her own language, "without any examination, I was committed by Judge Dowling." Her gentle bearing and lady-like address again stood her good stead, however, and in a few days she was released.
She now consulted the late James T. Brady, the greatest lawyer who ever practiced at the American bar, and after listening carefully to her statement, he promised to see her "righted." Pending legal action that eminent advocate died, and in the beginning of February, 1869, she took the opinion of Edwin James, the English barrister, and a suit was immediately inst.i.tuted against her whilom lawyer lover in the Court of Common Pleas, damages being laid at $100,000. When the defendant received notice of the suit he hastened to see Mr. James, and during several conversations offered any reasonable compromise to procure a stay of proceedings. The lady"s version of the suit and the subsequent negotiations is as follows: "The suit was never placed on the calendar.
It was arranged with Mr. James to allow the case to proceed a certain length and then obtain a release. Mr. James got no retainer, but took my case on speculation, with the understanding that he was to have one thousand dollars at the end of the suit, if there were any proceeds from the same. He continuously urged me to go to Europe with my daughter for two years, and they would advance the money; but I declined. An order was obtained by the defendant"s lawyer to examine me; whereupon Mr.
James advised me to leave the city in order to avoid the examination. On my return Mr. James advised me to release the suit on the payment of a certain sum by the defendant, he, the defendant, at the same time to make an apology for what he had done and to express regret for my sufferings."
Accordingly, on May 27, 1868, she wrote a letter by advice of her counsel, authorizing him to withdraw the suit on these conditions, and early in June she signed a "general release," professing afterwards to be entirely ignorant of the nature of the instrument. Indeed the unhappy woman cared more for an expression of regret from her enslaver than for any pecuniary solace, and she received no money, although her lawyer did, when the general release was signed. When she discovered the nature of the instrument she was extremely indignant and demanded from Mr.
James the telegrams and letters in his possession which had been sent to her by her worshiper in the heyday of their pa.s.sion. The lawyer hesitated and delayed, and finally, being pressed by a friend and kinsman of the unhappy lady, said, "I won"t give them up unless I have an order from the court." Subsequently he claimed that he had destroyed these tell-tale doc.u.ments, and that the "general release" authorized the proceedings.
She now consulted another law firm, but her case came to nothing, and meantime her former adorer, now grown fiercely hostile, inst.i.tuted proceedings in the Supreme Court, for the purpose of procuring a perpetual injunction to forever restrain her from hara.s.sing him with such suits. This was in 1870, in the early days of March, when the writer saw her last, and conversed with her on her wrongs. Her picture lives in his recollection yet: The soft, large brown eyes, half sad and half voluptuous in their tenderness; the soft, pleading face, with a refinement--even a sort of n.o.bleness--that had outlived the sacrifice of her virtue and reputation. To the last she was a lady of extreme sweetness of manner, and a fascinating and interesting conversationalist.
Another notable man, now also a member of the "great majority"--a renowned Shakespearean critic, author and censor in the domain of _belles-lettres_--brought great trouble and humiliation upon himself by an amour with a ridiculously plain-looking and by no means young woman.
He had naturally, perhaps, a _penchant_ in that direction, for on the appearance of the Lydia Thompson troupe of original British blondes in this city, he wrought himself into a fervor of pa.s.sionate folly over the statuesque Markham, and designated her in his Erosian outpourings as "she of the vocal velvet voice." There may have been some excuse for this pa.s.sing delirium, and many others were touched by it, Pauline Markham was a singularly beautiful girl, and she never looked so well as when she sang; it sent warmth into her lips and took the hardness from her face. But the lady with whom he became involved in a sc.r.a.pe, with the attendant litigation, payment of damages, danger of publicity and total ruin of reputation in the exclusive places where his character was respected and his judgment esteemed, was in every respect different from the lady of burlesque opera. Bitterly did he regret his follies, for the facts were given to a newspaper famous for its sensations, and the great _litterateur_ was compelled literally to go down on his marrow bones to induce the editor to withhold the particulars of his seduction of the lady from publication. The sword of Damocles was suspended for weeks, during which the high-toned censor"s condition was sometimes pitiable to see. His entreaties finally carried the point, and the case became one of those scandals of the existence of which the public never dreams.
CHAPTER XIV.
PROCURESSES AND THEIR VICTIMS.
_Clandestine Meetings at Seemingly Respectable Resorts--The "Introduction House."_
The revelations not long since published in the London _Pall Mall Gazette_ revealed fashionable aristocratic depravity in the British metropolis in a shamefully disreputable light, and disclosed the services of the professional procuress in all their repulsive loathsomeness. Although we do not possess t.i.tled libertines at elegant leisure here, there can be no manner of doubt that the procuress plies her vocation among us, and thrives on a liberally perennial patronage.
Whatever may be her characteristics in other respects, she is invariably an elegantly-dressed woman, with persuasive address, suave speech and attractive mien. In most cases procuresses possess houses of their own, where they procure desirable ladies for their patrons. Sometimes these establishments are termed "Introducing houses," and, as may be imagined, are exceedingly lucrative to their proprietors. Sometimes ladies are boarded and lodged in the house; but they are usually "independent," or, in other words, living under the protection of some patron of the establishment. Some of these procuresses possess a list of ladies whom they can send a messenger for on demand. Take the case of a well-known establishment in one of the most fashionable quarters up-town, for example:
A wealthy broker, speculator, or attache of Uncle Sam, calls upon the lady of the house at a fashionable afternoon hour, orders wine, and enters into conversation about indifferent matters, until he is able delicately to broach the subject he has in view. He explains that he wishes to meet with a quiet lady, whose secrecy he can rely upon, and whom he can trust in every possible way. He intimates his preference for an elegantly-formed, young and fairly good-looking acquaintance, and would like her, in addition, to be vivacious, witty and a little gay.
The lady of the house listens complacently, and replies that she is acquainted with a lady who will suit him to a nicety, and offers to send a message for her at once, if he wishes; but he must take his chance of her being at home. Should she be out, she intimates an appointment will be made for next day. In the meantime, a messenger is dispatched to the lady in question, and more wine is ordered and drank. When the lady arrives, the introduction takes place, and the business is transacted, as far as the procuress is concerned. Sometimes the gentleman pays the professional fee, and sometimes the lady gives half the money she receives from the patron to the madame of the house.
Not infrequently these procuresses will write to men of means of their acquaintance, informing them in some cipher or slang phrase that they have a new importation in their house awaiting eligible disposition.
Large sums are often paid under such circ.u.mstances, and the fresh importation is usually sold in this way five or six times. In other words, she is represented as a maid and imposed upon men as a virgin; which fabrication, as it is difficult to disprove, is believed, more especially if the girl herself be well instructed.
To the house up-town, to which reference has been made above, both married and unmarried ladies repair, in order to meet with and be introduced to gentlemen. This sort of clandestine meeting is greatly on the increase in New York, as it is also in Paris and in London. Some curious facts have come to us in a professional way, to which we can only refer in a general manner here. The following is a case in point:
A brilliant and handsome lady, belonging to the best society in Gotham, married to a man of wealth, found herself unhappy in his society, and after some time unwillingly came to the conclusion that she had formed an alliance that was destined to make her miserable. Her pa.s.sions were naturally strong and her education had not been of the kind calculated to enable her to control them. She had been, pampered and petted, and had been accustomed to have every desire gratified. One day the name of the "Introduction-house" madame came up in conversation at a lady friend"s house, and the naughtiness of the topic was discussed with the freedom characteristic of progressive society ladies, safe from intrusive masculine ears. A few days after, she ordered a cab and drove to the house in question. She was received with _empress.e.m.e.nt_, and informed that it was not necessary to explain the nature of her business. That, she was a.s.sured, was understood. She was shown into a handsome drawing-room, elegantly furnished and upholstered, and requested to wait a few minutes.