ell me that American society girls, city-bred,
and living at the end of the nineteenth century, don't know about
things. Why, man alive, how can they help but know? Look at those that
have brothers--don't you suppose they know, and if they know, why don't
they use their influence to stop it? I tell you if any one were to write
up the lives that we young men of the city lead after dark, people
wouldn't believe it. At that party that Henrietta Vance gave last month
there were about twenty fellows there and I knew every one, and I was
looking around the supper-table and wondering how many of those young
fellows had never been inside of a disreputable house, and there was
only _one_ beside Dolly Haight!"

Young Haight exclaimed at this, laughing good-naturedly, twirling his
thumbs, and casting down his eyes with mock-modesty.

"Well, that's the truth just the same," Vandover went on. "We young men
of the cities are a fine lot. I'm not doing the baby act. I'm not laying
the blame on the girls altogether, but I say that in a measure the girls
are responsible. They want a man to be a _man_, to be up to date, to be
a man of the world and to go in for that sort of vice, but they don't
know, they don't dream, how rotten and disgusting it is. Oh, I'm not
preaching. I know I'm just as bad as the rest, and I'm going to have a
good time while I can, but sometimes when you stop and think, and as
Dolly says 'call things by their right names,' why you feel, don't you
know--_queer_."

"I don't believe, Van," responded young Haight, "that it's _quite_ as
bad as you say. But it's even wrong, I think, that a good girl should
know anything about vice at all."

"Oh, that's nonsense," broke in Geary; "you can't expect nowadays that a
girl, an American girl, can live twenty years in a city and not know
things. Do you think the average modern girl is going to be the
absolutely pure and innocent girl of, say, fifty years ago? Not much;
they are right on to things to-day. You can't tell them much. And it's
all right, too; they know how to look out for themselves, then. It's
part of their education; and I think if they haven't the knowledge of
evil, and don't know what sort of life the average young man leads, that
their mothers ought to tell them."

"Well, I don't agree with you," retorted young Haight. "There's
something revolting in the idea that it's necessary a young girl should
be instructed in that sort of nastiness."

"Why, not at al