e street near the store, spends a
certain number of evenings and nights with them at hotels where no
course of catechism takes place at the clerk's desk. She goes to Coney
Island or local beer gardens on Sundays, manifesting a vivid animal
pleasure in her enjoyment, with little manifestation of gratitude
towards her escort who is supplying the money.

Sometimes, again, an exceptionally pretty girl will fall a victim to the
proprietor, the manager or some of the superintendents of the store; and
there have been cases of this kind heard in the courts, in one of which
the proprietor not only seduced the girl, but married her, afterwards
obtaining a divorce because of her incontinence. Sometimes the lapse of
these girls from the paths of virtue is accompanied with exceptional
hardships. The young lady is beautiful as well as good perhaps, and the
pride of her idolizing parents, who have taught her that she is fit to
be the wife of a duke. She attracts the eye of a man about town, and the
process of courting and flattery--of sapping and mining--begins, with
the result that he has had in view since the inception of the
acquaintance. He is not a bad fellow as the world goes; but providence
and society have made it very hard for single men to show kindness to
single women in any way but one. He is sorry at her situation; but she
is hardly the person for him to marry, even with her blooming,
flower-like face. In such a situation--and such situations are far too
common with the class--Byron's lines, slightly altered, seem peculiarly
applicable to the pretty shop girl:

"'Twas thine own beauty gave the fatal blow,
And help'd to plant the wound that laid thee low."

Sometimes it happens that the pretty girl, wearied of waiting for her
knightly deliverer, comes across the advertisement of a gifted
seeress--the seventh daughter of a seventh daughter, perchance, or "the
only English prophetess who has the genuine Roman and Arabian talismans
for love, good luck, and all business affairs;" or the wonderful
clairvoyant who can be "consulted on absent friends, love, courtship and
marriage." Not infrequently she falls into the toils of those
advertising frauds, who frequently combine the vile trade of procuress
with the ostensible trade of fortune-telling. When the girl is drawn to
this den, the trump card offered her is, of course, the young gentleman,
rich as Croesus and handsome as Adonis, with whom she is to fall in
love. He is