The assignation houses are usually located convenient to the great
arteries of travel, and, as we have already hinted, they are largely
patronized; while the number of "flash hotels" which are frequented by
the "soiled doves" and their mates, is also numerous and scarcely less
notorious than the assignation houses. The proprietors of these
"convenient" hotels invariably keep the hotel register required by law,
but agreeably fail to ask their lodgers for the time being to chronicle
either their own or even a fictitious name, thus, day after day,
violating a specific statute.

Besides these, there are assignation houses of a far different
character. By these we mean the introducing houses, such as ostensible
millinery establishments and the like in fashionable but retired
streets, where ladies meet their lovers. Married women of the _haut
ton_, with wealthy, hard-working husbands courting Mammon downtown,
imitating the custom of Messalina, not uncommonly make use of these
places. Sometimes the lady will even take along her young child as a
"blind," and the little innocent will be regaled with sweetmeats in the
parlor while the mother keeps her appointment up-stairs.

Liberally, every woman who yields to her passions and loses her virtue
is what Tom Hood would have called "one more unfortunate," but many draw
a distinction between those who live by promiscuous intercourse, and
those who merely manifest, like the ladies referred to above, a
_penchant_ for one man. There is still another denomination of this
latter kind, whom all the world has heard of as kept mistresses. These
women exercise a potent influence upon society and contribute largely to
swell the numbers of well-to-do young men who manifest an invincible
distaste to marriage. Lais, when under the protection of a prince of the
blood; Aspasia, whose friend is one of the most influential noblemen in
the kingdom; Phryne, the _chere ami_ of a well-known officer, or a man
of wealth known on the stock exchange and in the city--have all great
influence upon the tone of morality, while the glare of their dazzling
profligacy falls upon and bewilders those who are in a lower condition
of life, and acts as an incentive to similar deeds of licentiousness,
though necessarily on a more limited scale.

The prevalence of the kept mistress surpasses the wildest imagining in
this city, although in many a home her dire influence has extinguished
the Hymeneal torch, and left not