edit, the journalists who had
done all the mischief kept paying vice the homage of assuming that it
is enormously popular and lucrative, and that I and Mr Daly, being
exploiters of vice, must therefore be making colossal fortunes out of
the abuse heaped on us, and had in fact provoked it and welcomed it with
that express object. Ignorance of real life could hardly go further.

One consequence was that Mr Daly could not have kept his financial
engagements or maintained his hold on the public had he not accepted
engagements to appear for a season in the vaudeville theatres [the
American equivalent of our music halls], where he played How He Lied
to Her Husband comparatively unhampered by the press censorship of
the theatre, or by that sophistication of the audience through press
suggestion from which I suffer more, perhaps, than any other author.
Vaudeville authors are fortunately unknown: the audiences see what the
play contains and what the actor can do, not what the papers have told
them to expect. Success under such circumstances had a value both for Mr
Daly and myself which did something to console us for the very unsavory
mobbing which the New York press organized for us, and which was not the
less disgusting because we suffered in a good cause and in the very best
company.

Mr Daly, having weathered the storm, can perhaps shake his soul free
of it as he heads for fresh successes with younger authors. But I have
certain sensitive places in my soul: I do not like that word "ordure."
Apply it to my work, and I can afford to smile, since the world, on the
whole, will smile with me. But to apply it to the woman in the street,
whose spirit is of one substance with our own and her body no less holy:
to look your women folk in the face afterwards and not go out and hang
yourself: that is not on the list of pardonable sins.

POSTSCRIPT. Since the above was written news has arrived from America
that a leading New York newspaper, which was among the most abusively
clamorous for the suppression of Mrs Warren's Profession, has just been
fined heavily for deriving part of its revenue from advertisements of
Mrs Warren's houses.

Many people have been puzzled by the fact that whilst stage
entertainments which are frankly meant to act on the spectators as
aphrodisiacs, are everywhere tolerated, plays which have an almost
horrifyingly contrary effect are fiercely attacked by persons and papers
notoriously indifferent to public m