her boots. She agreed, and he took her to a hotel, paid half a
guinea for a room, and, when she sat down, got under the table
and licked her boots, which were covered with mud; he did nothing
more. Then there were some things, she said, that were too dirty
to repeat; well, one man came home with her and her friend and
made them urinate into his mouth. She also had stories of
flagellation, generally of men who whipped the girls, more rarely
of men who liked to be whipped by them. One man, who brought a
new birch every time, liked to whip her friend until he drew
blood. She knew another man who would do nothing but smack her
nates violently. Now all these things, which come into the
ordinary day's work of the prostitute, are rooted in deep and
almost irresistible impulses (as will be clear to any reader of
the discussion of Erotic Symbolism in the previous volume of
these _Studies_). They must find some outlet. But it is only the
prostitute who can be relied upon, through her interests and
training, to overcome the natural repulsion to such actions, and
gratify desires which, without gratification, might take on other
and more dangerous forms.

Although Woods Hutchinson quotes with approval the declaration of a
friend, "Out of thousands I have never seen one with good table manners,"
there is still a real sense in which the prostitute represents, however
inadequately, the attraction of civilization. "There was no house in
which I could habitually see a lady's face and hear a lady's voice," wrote
the novelist Anthony Trollope in his _Autobiography_, concerning his early
life in London. "No allurement to decent respectability came in my way. It
seems to me that in such circumstances the temptations of loose life will
almost certainly prevail with a young man. The temptation at any rate
prevailed with me." In every great city, it has been said, there are
thousands of men who have no right to call any woman but a barmaid by her
Christian name.[210] All the brilliant fever of civilization pulses round
them in the streets but their lips never touch it. It is the prostitute
who incarnates this fascination of the city, far better than the virginal
woman, even if intimacy with her were within reach. The prostitute
represents it because she herself feels it, because she has even
sacrificed her woman's honor in the effort to identify herself with it.
She has unb