n. The exceptions to the rule are very rare, so that we are
warranted in asserting that these first-class houses change their inmates
every year. A life of shame soon makes havoc with a woman's freshness,
if not with her beauty, and the proprietress has no use for faded women.
She knows the attraction of "strange women," and she makes frequent
changes as a matter of policy. Furthermore, the privacy of these places
demands that the women shall be as little known to the general public as
possible.

Whatever may be the reason, the change is inevitable. One year of luxury
and pleasure, and then the woman begins her downward course. The next
step is to a second-class house, where the proprietress is more cruel and
exacting, and where the visitors are rougher and ruder than those who
frequented the place in which the lost one began her career. Two or
three years in these houses is the average, and by this time the woman
has become a thorough prostitute. She has lost her refinement, and, it
may be, has added drunkenness to her other sin, and has become
full-mouthed and reckless. She has sunk too low to be fit for even such
a place as this, and she is turned out without pity to take the next step
in her ruin. Greene street, with its horrible bagnios, claims her next.
She becomes the companion of thieves--perhaps a thief herself--and passes
her days in misery. She is a slave to her employer, and is robbed of her
wretched earnings. Disease and sickness are her lot, and from them she
cannot escape. She is never by any chance the companion of a
"respectable" man, but her associates are as degraded as herself. She
may fall into the hands of the police, and be sent to the Island, where
the seal is set to her damnation. A year or two in a Greene street house
is all that a human being can stand. The next descent is to Water street
or some kindred thoroughfare. Almost immediately she falls a victim to
the terrible scourge of these places. Disease of the most loathsome kind
fastens itself upon her, and she literally rots to death. Such faces as
look out upon you from those Water street dens! Foul, bloated with gin
and disease, distorted with suffering and despair, the poor creatures do
what they can to hasten their sure doom. It all happens in a few years,
seven or eight at the longest. Ninety-nine women out of every hundred go
down the fearful road I have marked out. I care not how beautiful, how
attractive, how san