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That night I happened to be watching the raid myself from a convenient street-corner. Unconsciously I stood up against a street-lamp with a shade over me, made of tin about the size of a soldier's steel helmet. Along came a French street-walker, looked at me standing there under that tiny canopy, and with a laugh said as she swiftly passed me, "C'est un abri, monsieur?" looking up.
"Look at your blouse. You might be undressed. You are a shame to your sex. One would say you are a Piccadilly street-walker and they wouldn't be far wrong. I won't have you making faces at my visitors. Understand that." Winnie said: "I don't." "You must change, miss," Mrs. Harries went on. "Or you can pack your box and go on the streets.
Scarcely a week went by, that some hand did not lift that latch, and some girl in her first trouble, or some street-walker, dying of her trade, did not step in to the tiny hall where the lamp burnt all night, and wait for the sound of the descending footsteps on the stairs, which meant shelter and pity, warmth and food.
'I'll have no such nasty language in my house, I says, 'and you pretending and pulling the wool over people's eyes and making them think you're educated and fit to be a teacher and look out for young people's morals you're worse 'n any street-walker! I says. I let her have it good. I wa'n't going to flinch from my bounden duty and let her think that decent folks had to stand for her vile talk.
She is happy with a horrible happiness. She enters backwards into indignant Eden. We do not sufficiently reflect upon this that is within us and cannot be lost. Prostitution, vice, crime, what matters! Night may become as black as it likes, the spark is still there. However low you go there is light. Light in the vagabond, light in the mendicant, light in the thief, light in the street-walker.
"What does she do?" he asked again. "Why, don't you know what a street-walker is?" "Not very well," said Thyrsis. It took some time for him to get the desired information, because the other could not realize the depths of his ignorance. "They sell themselves to men," he said. "But what for?" asked Thyrsis. "You don't mean that they they let them " "They have intercourse together. Of course."
A volley brought the wretched creature down, and with a piercing shriek she toppled off the barricade. A silence of horror fell alike upon besiegers and besieged. Suddenly another woman appeared. This one was even younger and more beautiful; she was almost a child, being barely seventeen years of age. Oh! the pity of it! She, too, was a street-walker.
"I don't want her under my roof. If she wants to be a street-walker, let her be one, but she shall not stay here. Pack your things," he added, staring at her. Jennie had no word to say, but the children cried loudly. "Be still," said Gerhardt. "Go into the kitchen." He drove them all out and followed stubbornly himself. Jennie went quietly to her room.
Things which are tolerated in London and New York streets, are not permitted in the streets of Paris. A street-walker ventured to accost an Englishman in Paris at night, and was taken in charge by the police. But this outward fairness only indicates that in Paris, even the vices are regulated by the state.
Never in her life had she been subjected to such an outrage, never had she been so deeply insulted. . . . She, well-educated, refined, the daughter of a teacher, was suspected of theft; she had been searched like a street-walker! She could not imagine a greater insult. And to this feeling of resentment was added an oppressive dread of what would come next.
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